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'Concise and precise' seems the be the goal of this language. Like assembly language. It doesn't seem useful for mere humans. I would prefer playfulness and amb

'Concise and precise' seems the be the goal of this language. Like assembly language. It doesn't seem useful for mere humans. I would prefer playfulness and ambiguity.

philippnagel 10y ago
Does playfulness necessarily exclude preciseness?
- quirkot 10y ago
  To the extent it involves benign misdirection, yes
  - JadeNB 10y ago
    I think that playful mathematics certainly exists.
anaximander 10y ago
Is assembly language not useful for mere humans? Certainly, every human-friendly programming language abstraction that we use today is built off of something like assembly language.
whitten 10y ago
I think precision is necessary if you expect to use the language to invoke conclusions or as a basis for inference. Ambiguity in this context means you can derive some information but not as much as if it were precise. "The weather is stormy" doesn't give you information about whether you need snowshoes or rainboots.
- schoen 10y ago
  An interesting problem is that constructed languages that avoid syntactic ambiguity by having a formal grammar with no unambiguous parsing (like Lojban and, I think, Ithkuil) can still have semantic ambiguity. In Lojban there is never a syntactic ambiguity about what the asserted relationship between concepts is, but the language community readily admits that the underlying concepts themselves still contain cultural and other ambiguities, in terms of whether given language users would agree to apply those concepts to particular things, situations, or people. It's very possible that conlangs like Lojban and Ithkuil still contain concepts about storms that don't require a speaker to indicate what kind of precipitation the storm produced.
  - wolfgang42 10y ago
    I'm by no means a Lojban expert, but some fiddling with http://jbovlaste.lojban.org http://jbovlaste.lojban.org leads me to "vilti'a" for "storm", a combination of "tcima" (x1 is weather/a meteorological phenomenon [at place x2]) and "vlile" (x1 is violent/in a state of violence). You can then further refine this, e.g. by adding "lindi" (x1 is a lightning/electical arc) to get "lidvilti'a" for a thunderstorm [at place x2].
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    Lojban focuses on relations, in the logical sense, between objects. Some relations are very concrete and familiar to English speakers and some are not. Here are some examples of Lojban relations: mlatu = x1 (entity) is a cat of species x2 (taxon) As a noun: lo mlatu — cat. carvi = x1 (entity) rains or showers to x2 (entity) from x3 (entity) As a noun: lo carvi — rain. lo te carvi — rain cloud. simxu = x1 (entity group) mutually do x2 (relation between members of x1, contains two places for [ce'u]) As a noun: lo se simxu — done mutually. cnemu = x1 (entity) rewards x2 (entity) for atypical x3 (property of x2) with x4 (entity, property of x1) As a noun: lo cnemu — rewarder. lo se cnemu — rewardee. lo te cnemu — reason for a reward. lo ve cnemu — reward.
dkarl 10y ago
I think precision in language is like scientific knowledge. No matter how far we extend it, the limit will always be there when we want to enjoy it. Not way out there but right here, like you never have to reach far from a set of rational numbers to find a real number outside the set.
Jtsummers 10y ago
Assembly isn't concise, though it is precise. An expression (program) to do anything substantial is actually pretty verbose in assembly, it's the programming equivalent of "show your work" in algebra class. Especially the way modifiers are used, this reminds me more of the APL/J family of languages. Start off with words (verbs and such in those languages) and allow for modifiers (adverbs) that alter their behavior and meaning (sometimes significantly, while still retaining the core concept of the root verb).
JCzynski 10y ago
Precision is totally compatible with deliberate ambiguity and playfulness. As examples: Esperanto tries very hard to be precise, but there are playful neologisms, like "gedormi", which conjugates "dormi", "to sleep", in the mixed-gender plural, to form "to sleep with (heterosexually)", with the same innuendo as in English. In Lojban, there is an abundance of poetry in which pieces of the phrases are intentionally and visibly omitted, which allows for flexible interpretation of created ambiguity.

'Concise and precise' seems the be the goal of this language. Like assembly language. It doesn't seem useful for mere humans. I would prefer playfulness and ambiguity.

philippnagel 10y ago

Does playfulness necessarily exclude preciseness?

quirkot 10y ago
To the extent it involves benign misdirection, yes
- JadeNB 10y ago
  I think that playful mathematics certainly exists.

anaximander 10y ago

Is assembly language not useful for mere humans? Certainly, every human-friendly programming language abstraction that we use today is built off of something like assembly language.

whitten 10y ago

I think precision is necessary if you expect to use the language to invoke conclusions or as a basis for inference. Ambiguity in this context means you can derive some information but not as much as if it were precise. "The weather is stormy" doesn't give you information about whether you need snowshoes or rainboots.

schoen 10y ago
An interesting problem is that constructed languages that avoid syntactic ambiguity by having a formal grammar with no unambiguous parsing (like Lojban and, I think, Ithkuil) can still have semantic ambiguity. In Lojban there is never a syntactic ambiguity about what the asserted relationship between concepts is, but the language community readily admits that the underlying concepts themselves still contain cultural and other ambiguities, in terms of whether given language users would agree to apply those concepts to particular things, situations, or people. It's very possible that conlangs like Lojban and Ithkuil still contain concepts about storms that don't require a speaker to indicate what kind of precipitation the storm produced.
- wolfgang42 10y ago
  I'm by no means a Lojban expert, but some fiddling with http://jbovlaste.lojban.org http://jbovlaste.lojban.org leads me to "vilti'a" for "storm", a combination of "tcima" (x1 is weather/a meteorological phenomenon [at place x2]) and "vlile" (x1 is violent/in a state of violence). You can then further refine this, e.g. by adding "lindi" (x1 is a lightning/electical arc) to get "lidvilti'a" for a thunderstorm [at place x2].
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  Lojban focuses on relations, in the logical sense, between objects. Some relations are very concrete and familiar to English speakers and some are not. Here are some examples of Lojban relations: mlatu = x1 (entity) is a cat of species x2 (taxon) As a noun: lo mlatu — cat. carvi = x1 (entity) rains or showers to x2 (entity) from x3 (entity) As a noun: lo carvi — rain. lo te carvi — rain cloud. simxu = x1 (entity group) mutually do x2 (relation between members of x1, contains two places for [ce'u]) As a noun: lo se simxu — done mutually. cnemu = x1 (entity) rewards x2 (entity) for atypical x3 (property of x2) with x4 (entity, property of x1) As a noun: lo cnemu — rewarder. lo se cnemu — rewardee. lo te cnemu — reason for a reward. lo ve cnemu — reward.

dkarl 10y ago

I think precision in language is like scientific knowledge. No matter how far we extend it, the limit will always be there when we want to enjoy it. Not way out there but right here, like you never have to reach far from a set of rational numbers to find a real number outside the set.

Jtsummers 10y ago

Assembly isn't concise, though it is precise. An expression (program) to do anything substantial is actually pretty verbose in assembly, it's the programming equivalent of "show your work" in algebra class. Especially the way modifiers are used, this reminds me more of the APL/J family of languages. Start off with words (verbs and such in those languages) and allow for modifiers (adverbs) that alter their behavior and meaning (sometimes significantly, while still retaining the core concept of the root verb).

JCzynski 10y ago

Precision is totally compatible with deliberate ambiguity and playfulness. As examples: Esperanto tries very hard to be precise, but there are playful neologisms, like "gedormi", which conjugates "dormi", "to sleep", in the mixed-gender plural, to form "to sleep with (heterosexually)", with the same innuendo as in English. In Lojban, there is an abundance of poetry in which pieces of the phrases are intentionally and visibly omitted, which allows for flexible interpretation of created ambiguity.