2005/03/30 Lojban

© March 2005 Tony Lawrence

A language.

While I understand that this probably has value in studying languages in general, I think parts of it are more than silly. Why, for example, avoid having a word with more than one meaning? Very often, the multiple meanings are related in ways that can help with comprehension and give deeper insight - it may confuse computers, but it helps us. As to not confusing computers, I think that is another pointless goal: computer ability and power continues to increase and I'm sure that accurate natural language processing is just a matter of time. I suppose that until that time, it could be useful to store text in Lojban and let people choose translators to bring it to their own language - that might help eliminate ambiguity for now, but I suspect that translating TO Lojban would be a very "lossy" process and probably only suitable for the most boring of texts.

From https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban

    * The grammar is based on predicate logic, and is capable of
    expressing complex logical constructs precisely.
    * It has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling or grammar,
    so it can be easily parsed by computer.
    * Lojban is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
    * It is, nonetheless, simple to learn and use compared to many
    natural languages.

While the initial goal of the Loglan project was to investigate
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the active Lojban community has additional
goals for the language, including:

    * General research into linguistics.
    * Research in artificial intelligence and machine understanding.
    * Improved human-computer communication, storage ontologies,
    and computer translation of natural language text.
    * Use of language as an educational tool.
    * Personal creativity.
 

If you do want more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban.

Got something to add? Send me email.

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