I see resonances with word games played by children and the foundations of computer science.
Loglan did try to implement some of computer science but based on a 1955 understanding of what became to be computer science. James Cooke Brown didn't focus on math. Math had to be created by the Lojban project as an afterthought. Because Loglan isn't number friendly it gave useful gismu space to months and weekdays instead of simply calling them by numbers. It has 4 cardinal directions like natlangs instead of allowing the user to specify any angle he pleases.
Lojban forget to include graph theory. I layed out how graph theory could be used to describe relationships in another thread
As far as backreferencing goes KOhA give you the ability to say: la .alis. klama le zarci .i ko'a goi la .alis. cu blanu Alice goes-to the store. It-1, also-known-as Alice, is-blue.
The problem with that is that it has to repeat unnecessary information.
I would prefer a construction that says: Alice goes-to the store. "Agent of last sentence" is-blue.
Along with one that says: Alice goes-to the store. "Destination of the last sentence" is-red.
The information about agent and destination is already communicated in a way where the brain has to keep track of it to understand the message.
To do that consistently you would need an ontological commitment that the destination for goes to is the same ontological concept as the destination for runs to. As far as Lojban is concerned those two concepts of destination have nothing to do with each other.
5.4) la .alis. goi ko'a klama le zarci .i ko'a cu blanu Alice, also-known-as it-1, goes-to the store. It-1 is-blue.
Have you reported this bookkeeping error to the LLG? I'm sure they would be happy to correct one dictionary or he other if you did.
No, I don't know how the internal reporting process of the LLG works. The probably also should simply have a script that checks for all words whether the translations have the same
Irrelevant as creating an international auxiliary lanugage is not the goal of the LLC.
Lojban doesn't seem to have any real goals. At the present it's a toy language and it will likely stay that way. On the other hand it would be great to have a useful loglang that takes a bigger role in society.
I'm happy that you have given the topic so much thought! I sincerely and enthusiastically look forward to studying your final product.
It will probably take 5 to 10 years. On open problem is language governance. How do you create a way that multiple people can work at the same language together while with minimal commitments to starting concepts?
I lack understanding of how new word formation works in languages that derive everything from roots like Esperanto/Hebrew/Chinese. It seems that new body of knowledge in academic science but also other fields of inquiry need a way to generate new words.
CFAR's coinage of a tap for a trigger-action plan seems to be a good move to bring a new concept into the language.
Apart from CFAR language development I also engage with other alternative knowledge systems build on top of English/German/French. I personally am not big on writing poety directly but I explore overloading words in other contexts like hypnosis.
I think open discussion about the flaws of existing languages is very important even when not immediately proposing an alternative.
The problem with that is that it has to repeat unnecessary information.
Oh, you want ri, ra, ru from selma'o KOhA5, and the go'a series from selma'o GOhA. You can also just use ko'a without explicit assignment and trust the audience to get the meaning from context the same way we do in most natural languages.
la .alis. klama le zarci .i ra goi ko'a cu blanu .i ko'a cu sidju
The ra selects for la .alis. without having to repeat any information. Alternately, if you don't trust your audience to understand counting rules, la .alis. goi ko'a cu klama le zarci .i ko'a cu sidju mi works just fine as well.
This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs, but their discussion seemed to have enough significance, independent of the original topic, to deserve a thread of its own. If I'm doing this correctly (this sentence is an after-the-fact update), then you should be able to link to the original comments that inspired this thread here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0h/linguistic_mechanisms_for_less_wrong_cognition/cxb2
Is a lack of ambiguity necessary for clear thinking? Are there times when it's better to be ambiguous? This came up in the context of the extent to which a conlang should discourage ambiguity, as a means of encouraging cognitive correctness by its users. It seems to me that something is being taken for granted here, that ambiguity is necessarily an impediment to clear thinking. And I certainly agree that it can be. But if detail or specificity are the opposites of ambiguity, then surely maximal detail or specificity is undesirable when the extra information isn't relevant, so that a conlang would benefit from not requiring users to minimize ambiguity.
Moving away from the concept of conlangs, this opens up some interesting (at least to me) questions. Exactly what does "ambiguity" mean? Is there, for each speech act, an optimal level of ambiguity, and how much can be gained by achieving it? Are there reasons why a certain, minimal degree of ambiguity might be desirable beyond avoiding irrelevant information?