6 ms·

Semantics are hard. There's a long-running slow-burning debate in the Lojban community about the degree to which BPFK, a guiding body for Lojban, is expected to

Semantics are hard. There's a long-running slow-burning debate in the Lojban community about the degree to which BPFK, a guiding body for Lojban, is expected to formalize the semantics and philosophy of the language. That said, this sounds like a shitpost. Syntax and morphology aren't solved problems for natlangs, and while Lojban's parsing might be messy, it is nonetheless far less ambiguous than English. Maybe a few Lojban words will enlighten you as to the power of the language? {ga'i} a marker for formal rank and formal register/diction {ko'a} a variable {goi} reassign names and variables {ce'u} a marker for holes under {ka} abstractions {ka} definitely not lambda! An abstractor for relations {ti'e} "I hear that..." a marker for unverifiable hearsay {da'i} "supposing..." a marker for counterfactuals Finally, here's something that SSC doesn't have (yet?), a tutorial: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda

tralarpa 8y ago
> {ti'e} "I hear that..." a marker for unverifiable hearsay > {da'i} "supposing..." a marker for counterfactuals Isn't there a language spoken in Africa with a similar concept? I remember vaguely that there was a minor scandal some years ago because a politician said something like "Unfortunately, we couldn't finish the project in time" and the translator used the wrong form, so it sounded like they never intended to do so.
- lmkg 8y ago
  Bulgarian has a verb form for the former. The latter is commonly encompassed by the subjunctive mood in Romance languages, although that also covers other meanings, depending on the specific language.
garmaine 8y ago
I'm quite familiar with lojban, thank you. And you must have a high bar for content if a critique is considered a "shitpost." Syntax and morphology are largely solved problems at the frontier of NLP. If you think that this is not the case, then I must ask by what metric do you make that judgement? We have machines that are able to transcribe human speech and infer intent with lower error rates than humans for the same task. QED. Formal semantics was hard at the time that loglans were codified. It was hard until very recently in fact. But that is no longer the case: Davidsonian event semantics is now expressive enough to give exact, unambiguous semantics for every desired utterance. There are still many unsolved problems in the field of semantics, but they are problems of the sort "what's the best way to represent..." not "how do we reconcile the two main theories giving totally opposite results." For an overview of the modern state of formal semantics I suggest this work, which successfully dissolved the last lingering major conflicts in the field: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10988-014-9162-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10988-014-9162-...

tralarpa 8y ago

> {ti'e} "I hear that..." a marker for unverifiable hearsay > {da'i} "supposing..." a marker for counterfactuals Isn't there a language spoken in Africa with a similar concept? I remember vaguely that there was a minor scandal some years ago because a politician said something like "Unfortunately, we couldn't finish the project in time" and the translator used the wrong form, so it sounded like they never intended to do so.

lmkg 8y ago
Bulgarian has a verb form for the former. The latter is commonly encompassed by the subjunctive mood in Romance languages, although that also covers other meanings, depending on the specific language.

garmaine 8y ago

I'm quite familiar with lojban, thank you. And you must have a high bar for content if a critique is considered a "shitpost." Syntax and morphology are largely solved problems at the frontier of NLP. If you think that this is not the case, then I must ask by what metric do you make that judgement? We have machines that are able to transcribe human speech and infer intent with lower error rates than humans for the same task. QED. Formal semantics was hard at the time that loglans were codified. It was hard until very recently in fact. But that is no longer the case: Davidsonian event semantics is now expressive enough to give exact, unambiguous semantics for every desired utterance. There are still many unsolved problems in the field of semantics, but they are problems of the sort "what's the best way to represent..." not "how do we reconcile the two main theories giving totally opposite results." For an overview of the modern state of formal semantics I suggest this work, which successfully dissolved the last lingering major conflicts in the field: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10988-014-9162-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10988-014-9162-...