kithpendragon comments on The value of ambiguous speech - Less Wrong

4 Post author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 07:58AM

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Comment author: kithpendragon 30 November 2015 01:11:33PM 4 points [-]

I happen to be studying lojban at the moment, and I think the designers have defined linguistic ambiguity not as the opposite of specificity (one of the first lojban words I learned was "zo'e" /ZO.he/, which means something like "contains contextually sensitive information that makes this utterance true, the exact value of which is irrelevant or obvious"), but rather as a linguistic property whereby a semantic construct cannot be pinned down to communicating a specific value. The classic English language example is "time flies like a banana", in which any of the first three words can be the verb.

Comment author: malcolmocean 05 December 2015 10:21:49PM 5 points [-]

Whoa, it never occurred to me that time could be the verb there.