Maxim 4: Loglans are unambiguous.
Officially, that means that they are
free of syntactic ambiguity, that the sentences cannot be analyzed in
more than one way. This does not prevent any other sort of
ambiguity: ambiguous words or phrases, ambiguous references, and so
on. Nor does it prevent vagueness, a lack of precision in the given
situation. Much of the history of the vocabulary of the Loglans has,
however, been directed against these problems as well.
The basic claim of anamphiboly flows
from the fact that FOPL++ is easily shown to be to be such and that
the Loglans, as derived from this base, with care, preserve this
feature. The immediate problem is that the Loglans were not derived
systematically from the base but were created by different processes
which, nonetheless kept that base more or less in sight. These
processes centered on grammatical theories and presentation that were
in several ways different from that employed in FOPL++. So the claim
of freedom from syntactic ambiguity rests on the products of these
theories, not on FOPL++. There are open (and unexplored) questions
whether every grammatical sentence according to these can be
automatically traced back to a well-formed formula of FOPL++;
whether, if so, the formula is the right one, given the meaning of
the sentence; whether every well-formed FOPL++ sentence gives rise to
a grammatical Loglan sentence (and the right one); whether there are
alternate, equally valid, grammars (from other theories perhaps) that
yield different results on Loglan sentences (giving them different
structures or even reversing their grammaticality). There are in
particular problems, more or less on the line between grammar and
semantics, about pronoun reference and the scope of quantifiers, two
systems from FOPL++ rejected early in Loglan history. Part of the
problem is simply that the transformation of FOPL++ to a Loglan using
familiar sort of rules has never been attempted . For now, though,
it seems that the Loglans are pretty much ambiguity free according to
their own grammars. And this is no small things, since no other
languages, natural or constructed, can make that claim or offer that
thorough a grammar.
Taking that as settled and despite
repeated advice against it, much attention in the Loglans has been
directed at other forms of ambiguity and vagueness. So, for example,
figurative meanings are to be marked to distinguish them from literal
ones and, typically, several level and types of figurative meaning
are also distinguished and marked (optionally, of course). But even
literal meanings have been refined considerably. Part of this is, of
course, just part of getting technical terminology for various
fields. But many of the discussions of new words suggest ordinary
applications are intended. Some of this is surely fed by L1
preconceptions, which find any other way of parceling out the
universe to be inherently wrong (never mind neutrality) and so want
to divide broader concepts (“vague”) or combine separate ones,
rather than leaving them stand on their own and working with them.
(Oddly, nothing seems to have ever been done with {klama}, which
covers two verbs in most familiar languages: “come” and “go”
in English, for example.) This is in addition to the natural
expansion of the vocabulary to meet the needs of the modern world:
words for pizza and smart phones and dick pix and whatever else in
todays headlines. So, the vocabulary of the Loglans (I admit I
really only know about Lojban here) has grown enormously and in a
fairly uncontrolled fashion. No authority seems to check words to
see if they are actually new or well formed or fit to their intended
use and no on seems to guarantee that all words coined get recorded
in a central file (of which there seem to be several, run by
different groups).
While the expansion of the predicate
vocabulary has been large, it has at least some natural roots. The
expansion of the particle vocabulary is proportionately even greater
and less clearly motivated. The phonological definition of a
particle (in Lojban, again) has been expanded several times to meet
the growing number of new forms suggested. While many of these new
forms are cases of preciding old forms and so make no new grammatical
categories, many others seem to be new grammatical functions (not
always terribly clear) and thus to require new grammatical rules.
And that requires another look at the whole grammar to see whether it
still coheres. It is not clear that this has been done for several
years. The overall effect has been to complicate a once fairly
straightforward grammar into something quite Rococo with relatively
little motivation other than someone's “brilliant idea” and a
plausible appeal to some language somewhere maybe doing it on some
level.
Since the grammar is both complex and
minutiae-laden, there is thus the practical question whether a
speaker can be sure that what they say is grammatical and what they
meant to say. The omission or misplacement of tiny particles can
materially change the whole structure (and so, presumably, meaning)
of a sentence. Loglans generally have low redundancy, so mistakes of
this sort are not as readily spotted as they might be in natural
languages, which offer added clues, nor is backtracking allowed.
But even in the area of fixed items,
there has been considerable uncertainty and change and lack of
settlement. To take the longest running case, {lo} was inherited by
Lojban from Loglan with a very unclear – indeed, diverse and
contradictory – definition. It is a term maker, a mate to {le},
itself a somewhat problematic version of the logical definite
descriptor (the unique object with the property if there is exactly
one but otherwise – the usual case – the thing the speaker has in
mind and calls by this name, regardless of whether it has the
property). The one sure thing about {lo} is that {lo brida} is
actually a brida – in some sense. After a long period of dispute
about the implicit quantifiers with the descriptors which decided
there were none, the question turned to what the expressions actually
referred to: the obvious things with the property (one or several –
which creates its own problems), the mass of such things, the
archetype of such things, and so on, usually trying to reproduce the
superficial expressions of, say, Trobriand Islanders or the Piriha~.
Eventually, a reasonable solution appeared to have been found in the
notion of plural reference (or Lesniewskian sets) and of saliency.
However, even after the dust settled, an informal survey suggests
that now two Lojbanists has the same idea about what the official
definition is and almost none have it nearly right. Similar, though
less virulent, discussions have clouded the issue of quantifiers,
resulting in a variety of basic ones in place of the original two.
In the case of anaphoric pronouns, there are several systems, formal
and informal, but no guarantee that they are collectively adequate,
short of actual repetition or overt assignments (not a part of
ordinary language). Some of the systems are also impractical to
apply, requiring remembering the exact grammatical role a word played
in an earlier sentence, for example. And failure here does reflect
back on syntactic ambiguity, since, if we cannot be sure whether what
goes in one place is the same as in another, we have lost the logical
form.
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