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?
Room for growth suggests that Lojban could outgrow it's horrible place system. I don't think that's true. It's a core design flaw. Admitting that lujvo are problematic doesn't help. They are a core feature of the language.
There's nothing consistent about gismu/lujvo places. The lojban dictionary isn't even consistent on the meaning of
melbi/beautiful.The translation to french suggests that X3 is a standard. The translation to English suggests that X3 is aspect while X4 is a standard. From the outside I might think that the pure lojban dictionary is the most important definition and it suggests that the word has three places. On the other hand most of the translations have four places. The English one has four places.
If we take the English one has canonical then why does X3 mean aspect for
beautifulbut X3 for good isn'taspect? That's far from there being consistent rules.The lack of prepositions means that you can't use them for backrefrerencing. That leaves Lojban which wants backreferencing to be evaluated automatically with the very ugly way of backreferencing via the beginning letter of words.
You can make the same arguments for a lot of languages. I do grant that Lojban has a variety of unique ideas that are useful to think about when designing a new language but too much is flawed at the core of Lojban for it being more of the toy language that it's at the moment.
I wrote a few ideas of how a better language can look like in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0h/linguistic_mechanisms_for_less_wrong_cognition/ . The rise of China and the way China works, suggests to me that they likely will decide in a few decades that they don't want to do their science in English. It would be great if we have a real alternative by that point that's acceptable to the Chinese because it's culturally neutral. I don't think Lojban can be that language.
You see a fundamentally flawed system. I see resonances with word games played by children and the foundations of computer science. We may be looking at something that touches deeply in our psyche here and that makes it worth continuing to explore.
Have you reported this bookkeeping error to the LLG? I'm sure they would be happy to correct one dictionary or the other if you did.
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