The Role of Errors in the History of Loglans 2

Maxim Two: Loglan was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

This would be the sexy metaphysical SWH of the 1920s into the 60s. Although it was never formulated very precisely, the general idea was that the structure of the language you spoke conditioned the way you viewed the world, giving you a naïve metaphysics which pervaded your thoughts and culture. Over the years there were a number of more detailed positions about how strongly to take “condition”, from “nudging you in a direction” to “totally determining your world view.” The strongest position was hard to hold in view of the numerous expositions of metaphysics of incompatible sorts in languages of a certain type (process philosophy in plug-and-socket English, for example, or the fact that both Plato and Aristotle wrote Greek). The weakest claims hardly came up to the level of a hypothesis rather than a casual observation, since nothing really counted as a counterexample. But somewhere in the middle there seemed to be a significant thesis.

The roots of this discussion lay in the change around the beginning of the 20^th century, from “civilizing” (deculturating) or killing tribal people to learning how that lived and viewed the world (empirical anthropology). And with that came studying the tribal languages in there own terms, rather than merely finding how they expressed various things from Latin (or Hebrew or, for a really scientific approach, English) grammar. And, as these studies piled up, it became clear that people spoke languages radically different from one another and especially from English (and the rest of the Indo-European European languages). And it was equally clear that how they described the components and structure of the world were very different from the familiar categories of naïve Euro-Americans , and, indeed, from the theories of not so naïve philosophers.

The familiar languages, which came to be called Standard Average European (SAE), were plug and socket affairs of nouns, which filled holes in adjectives to make bigger nouny things, and verbs, holey things which eventually had their holes filled by the nouny things to make sentences. Now there were languages which seemed to have no nouns at all, only verbs, say. Even people names were verbs. And then there were languages that had only nouns (or maybe they were adjectives) and no verbs. And words that could not be described in familiar European grammatical categories.

These strangenesses extended to vocabulary also. Beyond the apochryphal tales of the twenty-seven Eskimo words for snow, there were facts like that some languages had no color words except “black” and “white” or that they used the same word for blue and green (or different one for dark blue and light blue). These were less surprising, since there were occasional differences of this sort among the languages of Europe (or even within some one of them). But they tested out as genuinely affecting how people perceived the world (told to put all the blocks of the same color together, Navajo children regularly but the blues and the greens in the same pile, say). And there was other evidence that what you called a thing affected how you behaved in relation to it (Whorf on empty oil drums, for example, or, more significantly, word choice in propaganda). But the most interesting such differences came in the details of the language, the essential categories, like (loosely speaking from an SAE perspective) tense and case. Many languages did not have tense at all, even when they had verbs, and what they had instead (i.e., to deal with time relations) were elaborations on aspects and the like from the richest of Indo-European grammars and far beyond. Similarly, what happened to nouns, when there were some, bore little relation to familiar cases, even to the complex constructions on Finnish nouns. They even overlapped with tenses in some cases. And these differences seemed to have metaphysical significance, since they spoke to how the world of space and time (or whatever, it must be said at this point) was organized.

And now that the anthropologist-linguists could interview their subjects directly, rather than through an interpreter (or string of interpreters), they could get direct information about they viewed the world. And what they found, turned out to be a range of different metaphysics, of views about what is in the world and how it is put together. Although there are different details for each group, they came to be grouped together into a few broad categories, There was, of course, the “natural” view of individual independent things which took on properties and engaged in activities, but remained essentially the same throughout. Time and space are linear and are the framework within which things operate. By contrast, there is the world as a giant activity (maybe a process), involving countless subactivities and and subprocesses which flow into one another, or pass away or start up, with little vortices which are now part of one process, now of another and are counted as one only because of spatio-temporal continuity. Space and time are relative to particular processes and often circular as a result. Then there were the views that held that what there really were were enormous entities, various spelled out as masses and universals, and events were simply the collocation of chunks (or projections) of these archetypes, which were the primary individuals. Time and space derivative notion, if they played a role at all. (There actually several other language classes and metaphysics discovered, but these three were the most discussed and developed and they show the essentials of process.)

Comparing their language data and their metaphysical data, anthropologists discovered some interesting connections. It seemed that speakers of SAE languages (even if spoken far from Europe) were inclined to view the world as independent things entering into activities and so on, and to speak languages with tenses and take time and space as fame works. And conversely. Similarly, process metaphysics and a relativist view of times went with languages which were virtually all verbs – most opf which had aspects. And archetypes metaphysics went with all-noun languages. Correlation is not causation, of course, and here it might go either way, so for several decades there was a search for a test to find whether there was causation (preferably from language to metaphysics).

So, in 1955, James Cooke Brown, a newly minted Social Psychologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Florida, hit upon the idea of constructing a language, Loglan, that was not like any other – certainly not like that of the students who would be his subjects – and running some experiments with it: test subjects in a range of psychological and cultural traits, teach them the language thoroughly, then test them again to see what changes (if any) appeared (teaching other students some familiar language as a control group). But constructing the language turned out to be more complicated than planned as new ideas kept arising to be incorporated – and old one needed to be discarded. So the experiment was never performed. But the idea of the experiment – and the language that was to embody it – gained some public notice (Scientific American, June, 1960) and people asked about it. Brown had by then invented Careers, a popular board game, and left academia, but from time to time encouraged those interested in Loglan, getting some grants for developing the language and self-publishing various books about the language, giving enough details for people to manage intelligible utterances in it. In 1975, he started a major effort, publishing the most thorough books so far and starting an organization to promote the language (with many goals beyond that of a hypothesis test), including a journal for discussion of an in the language. In the classic politics of international auxiliary languages (which Loglan always officially denied it intended to be, but …) Loglan spawned Lojban, a virtual clone (remembering that clones differ markedly in outward appearance) which, after an unpleasant lawsuit, proceeds on its independent way, diverging ever more from the original, as it too has developed. Neither language still says much about SWH, but each pursues other sorts of goals. The test of SWH, for which Loglan was started, has never been performed or seriously attempted.

And this is just as well, since Loglan is totally misdesigned for that purpose. Loglan is based on First Order Predicate Logic (FOPL) and, though it has come to not look much like it, it retains that basic structure. But FOPL is the product of over 2000 years of European development, put into final form around the beginning of the 20^th century by English and German logicians (with significant help from French and Italian and eventually Polish); its entire history is in SAE languages. Not surprisingly, then, it is a paradigm case of an SAE language, terms plugging the holes in predicates to make sentences. As a result, teaching it to English speakers (the likely test subjects, but any Euro-Americans would do as well) would be merely exposing them to another language of the same type, presumably merely reenforcing their existing metaphysics rather than introducing a new one. I suppose one might try to find a group of speakers of, say, a process language and teach them a Loglan. But the process of devising appropriate tests for the new language and culture is prohibitive.

And futile. SWH in the metaphysical form dropped out of academic interest shortly after Loglan started up. Its underpinnings were made questionable (at least) by developments in the 1950s and 60s in Linguistics and the other social sciences. On the one hand, the differences between languages were found to be very superficial, with a basic common core across all languages. On the other hand, the way that people viewed the world and their place in it turned out, on more thorough examination, to be pretty much the same at the basic level. The great metaphysical differences proved to be merely a linguistic construct, made of inadequate analysis and incomplete observation.

In particular, in one major division in theoretical linguistics, sentences were seen as built up from particles very like terms and predicates into basic units, which then combined and were transformed through a series of processes resulting eventually in an utterance. The stages at which an utterance came to take on the peculiar surface structure of a given language were very late in process, in some versions even just the last step before phonetic realization. While these theories are not universally accepted (or even respected), their analytic and explanatory power make them a major force in the field. Even their opponents, those who point out, for example, that the process is too complex to allow for creating individual sentences on the fly in real time or that they cannot account for changing sentences in midutterance or that finding the same structure at the root in all languages looks suspiciously like an artifact of the procedures of analysis, still make use of some of the results. To be sure, some branches of this general pattern, like the claim that the basic structure just is FOPL – or, rather, an updated intensional version – are less widely held (or understood or developed) but are especially interesting to the Loglans, since they place its creation in the mainstream of linguistic research.

On the other side of the issue, the 1950s and 60s saw a new drive to put more science in the social sciences (well, the linguistic developments were part of that, too). In particular, there was a growing interest for creating objective tests for characteristics that the various social sciences were interested in. A report on what a subject actually did in certain situations was generally considered more significant than what the subject said it was doing. Indeed, language moderated data generally required some care in use, both from the subject and from the interpretations of the observers. So it was seen that people with different languages behaved very similarly in a variety of situations which were created (it was thought) to test the subject's view of itself and of the world around it. The result seemed to be that people everywhere behaved as though they were separate entities, not vortices in a stream nor chunks of greater whole and that they interacted with other things which were also independent, separate, objects. While all manner of challenges have been raised to the interpertation of these results and not all have been met successfully, the basic likeness of the non-verbal responses to situations remains, whatever its explanation. So, the final word (you wish!) on SWH is just that, when speaking about their world view, speakers spoke languages which their examiners took literally: process language speakers were viewed as having a process view of the world because they reported that view in a process language. But non-verbally they did nothing different that fit with the supposed view.

SWH had two other versions which persist after the metaphysical one disappeared. One is the New Age version that grows out of the metaphysical. In the 1950 to'70s (at least), when people were seeking some sort of mental/spiritual experience of a different world view, the suggestion (little understood in detail) that coming to speak a radically different language would produce this effect led many people (well, dozens) to learn the language of their particular path, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese, mainly, with no particular effect that could be traced to the language. Others, wanting to get away from all linguistic/cultural conditioning sought to transcend language by meditating on sounds or meaningless phrases or expressing themselves in glossolalia, again with effects that did not seem to be particularly related to the unlanguage involved. But the idea moved to the science fiction and hence conlang world, where it thrives. Starting a little early (1948) with Orwell's NewSpeak, that will make its speakers unquestioning servants of the grammarian state, there have been languages constructed – or at least described – to manage all manner useful traits: intelligence, happiness, spirituality, attractiveness and so on. Aside from some doubts about how well these languages are designed for their intended purposes (one popular one aimed at promoting a positive attitude is overloaded, more than two to one, with negative terms), the results have not been confirmatory of the general plan.

The other SWH that survives is the vocabulary version, which was dismissed as uninteresting and trivial in the early days. This version actually received some support from the more objective tests that harmed the metaphysical version. To be sure, it was not all success: where the old test, telling Navajo and Anglo children to put blocks of the same color together, led to the Navajo putting blue and green blocks in the same pile, the new test, which omitted reference to color (but forced that as the deciding factor), resulted in all the children creating virtually identical piles. But at the micro level, those same Navajo children are slower to identify colors as like sample one or sample two when both samples are in the turquoise range of the Navajo word. The differences are microscopic, but enough to show that some features – i.e., vocabulary – of a language do affect the way we see the world. The result most often seen touted as demonstrating SWH is the fact that Russian speakers, who have two words for blue, one for lighter and one for darker shades, are 0.17 seconds faster at identifying a sample flashed on a screen as being light or dark. I note this triumph without comment.

The Role of Errors in the History of Loglans 1C

Step C: Two-formulae sentence makers

The two-formulae sentence makers start with some adequate selection of the “propositional connectives” (the Loglans take AND, OR, IFF and REGARDLESS, though the last needs some extra work like the argument reordering for predicates). Added to these are similar connectives that go outside truth value logic to causation in various senses and various sorts of modalities. Like subjunctive conditionals (hypothetical, contrary-to-fact, etc.) as well as alternate logics like strict entailment or analytic entailment or relevant entailment (and relevant or analytic disjunctions as well) and so on through the plethora of logics. But, for the most part, these additions do not make grammatical differences and so do not need to be discussed separately here, even though the Loglans do accommodate some of them. (There is a similar plethora of logics for one-formula sentence makers and the Loglans have some of them as well, but again, they are grammatically of a piece with the standard items.)

Historically there are two ways that these sentence makers (conjunctions) are represented. The dominant form is infix – or Principia – notation, where the mark of the conjunction goes between the two formulae and the a pair of parentheses enclose the whole. The alternate form is prefix – or Polish – notation, where the mark goes before the pair and no further parentheses are needed. (There, admittedly, a third possibility, postfix or reverse Polish notation, where the mark comes after the pair. This was used on some calculators back in the day, but never had much play in Logic). From the point of view of an attempt to eliminate detritus, prefix is obviously the most desirable version. But as a feature in a spoken language, it seemed to put a strain on memory and and analysis. It seems to be harder to grasp CCpKqrKCpqCpr than even the fully parenthesized ((p→(q&r))→((p→q)&(p→r))). And, in FOPL as used, numerous abbreviations were possible, dropping parentheses under a variety of rules, including various additions to the the markers to show relative depth and the like. Prefix notation does not offer much in the way of abbreviations, except marking when a string the same connective occurs and this rather obscures structure than reveals it: C3pqpp is even more opaque that CCCpqpp.

The Loglans use both forms and, indeed, mix them in a single sentence. Obviously, this requires some care and, especially devices for showing boundaries of component sentences: Kpq&r is just ambiguous as it stands, requiring parentheses somewhere or a convention that tells where they go: (Kpq & r) or Kp(q&r). But such explicit parentheses or conventions or other devices are needed already for the infix forms in any case. As noted earlier, right parentheses are generally detritus – except in various situations where they are not. Right parentheses are needed more often, but they, too, can be dropped in many cases (and always the outermost ones if they begin the sentence). The rest of the infix cases depend upon conventions involving order of grouping (left grouping of similar conjunctions does not need parentheses – this and the following are not necessarily the Loglanic conventions, but familiar types) or type of conjunction (AND and OR don't need parentheses as components of IF). The Loglans also have depth markers, so that a conjunction marked n+1 is of a component of a sentence with a conjunction marked n. And there are convention about whether the prefix or the infix marker dominates in a mixed sentence.

There is one more marker that is needed in the Loglans. In prefix notation in FOPL, the boundary between the two connected sentences does not need to be marked, since the new sentence always begins in a distinctive way: a new conjunction or a one-formula formula maker or a predicate, any of which close off the previous sentence, which was down to a string of terms, into which these new markers do not fit. But in the Loglans, a new sentence can begin with a term or a quantifier, which now counts as a term, and so can appear to continue the string of terms of the previous sentence. One could, of course, require closing out all the terms and the previous entences to start afresh, but it is clearly more efficient to have, as in the case of the separation between subject term and predicate, a single marker to accomplish this necessity. As a plus, the separator can carry negations, which means that the initial conjunction can be simple and yet all of the logical relations be expressed.

With all these devices, it seems likely that any formula of FOPL can get an reasonably efficient unambiguous Loglanic formulation, though, short of a fully parenthesized one, I am not sure this has ever been proven (or questioned, even). What is less certain is whether a given formulation is in fact unambiguous and, even if it is, that it is an unambiguous representation of the formula intended. As will be discussed later, the test for anamphiboly is not directly tied to the structure of FOPL and the presumed indirect connections have not been tested (or, for the most part, stated). For now, however, the general expectation is enough to continue the claim that the Loglans are spoken FOPL.

But conjunctions introduce several new kinds of repetitive redundancies. And removing this detritus introduces new kinds of expressions into the Loglans, which, in turn, suggest new kinds of expressions in FOPL, expressions which may have been there but were not discussed earlier. Some of these cases are just matters of convenience (more efficient usage, a branch of speakability), others are genuine new notions. Similarly, so merely expand on already given categories, others change the boundaries of familiar structures.

To take a simple case, “Sam is tall and Sam drinks beer” (symbolically (Ts & Bs)); do we really have – in a human language – have to (or want to) repeat the “Sam”​ Just about every L1 experience says not. The Loglans could, of course, use a pronoun here, but that is hardly a savings. So we want to collapse the two sentences into the single subject and a complex predicate. Now, in the logical tool kit there is a device for doing just this, using a predicate making operator on a formula and a variable. This would result in \x(Tx &Bx) for the predicate and the desired sentence would be the \x(Tx & Bx)s, not an improvement. But we have some experience with which suggests immediately that we 1) move the subject to the from an replace the operator, 2) assume the bound variable inside is the subject and so drop it as covered in front, and 3) drop the superfluous right parenthesis. This gives s(T&B, or even sKT,B. We do need the left marker still, since B might be a sentence in its own right under some circumstances. It also turns out, that if the & here is a different word, peculiar to joining predicates, the left parenthesis is not needed (except in more complex cases) , so we can get down to sT+B. Curiously, this sort of change is not needed with K, since what follows the K up to the separator shows what sort of expression is involved. This factor will recur in what follows.

We can complicate this example slightly: “Sam is tall and Sam is going to San Francisco”: (Ts &Gsf). The first step in the collapse is\x(Tx & Gxf)s. But now, we need to proceed with some care, since the simple sT+Gf is unclear: f might be an argument to both predicates, especially if T is (as is usual in the Loglans) a predicate of more than one place with some later ones just not mentioned. There are two simple possibilities: either mark the end of the compound predicate to show that the following term goes with both or mark the term as being connected with just the last predicate (similar to the connection within terms). The general dislike of RHE markers favors the second approach, sT+G-f, but, in fact, as cases become more complicated, with some terms going with only one predicate and some with both (and with more predicates involved), both systems have to be used, so sT+Gf is also correct for this case (the final parenthesis, after the f, not being needed).

All of this amounts to a change like that seen earlier with quantifiers, a formula maker has become a more inner grammatical type, a predicate maker in this case. At least, unlike the case of quantifiers, the relative scope of the collapsed sentence is not a problem, always being a component of what larger sentence it lies immediately within. When the collapse is extended, the abstracted sentence itself more than one level deep, there may be internal problems of relative depth, but there are surely enough mechanisms in place for the fully sentential forms that fairly straightforward modifications can be made for these cases.

This pattern calls attention to another. A logician confronted with “This is a tiny galaxy” would likely transcribe it as “This is tiny and this is a galaxy”, KTt,Gt, which a Loglanist would immediately want to turn back into tKT,G. But that Loglanist would also recognize that this is just not right, even the tiniest galaxy is not tiny (or even small). So, how do we deal with these? Logic has a series of suggestions. The first is to simply say that “tiny galaxy” is a separate predicate, related to smallness and galaxies, if at all, only semantically and not formally. So a tiny-galaxy is indeed a galaxy and smaller than most other galaxies, but this is all additional information in the dictionary, not available grammatically, as it appears to be in the English. That is, the correct transcription is tW. This seems pretty unsatisfactory, even aside from the necessity of constantly creating new predicates which are related to existing one in similar ways. The second approach (and Loglan proper did this at one time) is to say that a number of adjectives (call them) are in fact two-place with the second place for some reference class, so “tiny” is actually “tiny for a ...” with the argument “a galaxy” or “galaxies” or some such added somehow (and just how is open to several suggestions) but presumably as a term (*G in the Loglan, say). So, we end up with tKGT-*G. This is clearly better, but the repeated G looks like redundancy. To be sure, we do occasionally want to use predicates of this sort non-redundantly: “He is tiny – for a walrus”, say (meanly), hKHT-*W. But, when the reference class is given directly, this seems unnecessary (and so to be eliminated for speakability purposes). So, the third approach is to produce a predicate maker which, in this case, asserts one predicate of the arguments and relativizes the other to that first and then assert that whole of the arguments again. While this case is typical, fine analyses have found other cases where two or more predicates interact to create something new, though related in regular ways to the underlying basic predicates (adverbs, for example, like “very” or “rapidly”). While the Loglans have developed experimentally a number of markers for different sorts of such situations, the general approach has been to use simple concatenation (as in English), so back to tTG (the reference class comes last). Since both predicates may well have other relevant arguments than t and may be complex in the way discussed in the previous paragraph, some markers of grouping and subordination may be needed, but there seem to be enough of those, either in the forms used for sentential cases or in slightly modified versions, to guarantee that an unambiguous expression can be found for these cases. In addition, one of the concatenated expressions might itself be a concatenation, not a buried sentential conjunction. Sorting out the half-dozen or so readings of “pretty little girls school” (tested later on such thing as “pretty little girls school teachers union regulations compliance monitors”) led to another system of prefix and infix and closure markers. parallel to those for collapsed sentential connectives – and some devices for resolving indeterminate scopes.

The opposite situation also often occurs: same predicate but different arguments “Sam is going to San Francisco and Bob is going to San Francisco”. Again, an anaphoric solution is possible, but offers no advantages over the original. So, as expected, the Loglans create a compound term here – not corresponding to anything at all common in FOPL and its kin. So, we get something like (s&b)Gf or, again with less detritus, Ks,bGf; the occurrence of only a term between conjunction and separator shows that this is a term maker. The infix system needs a different form of the conjunction again (neither sentential nor predicate), s^b,Gf, more or less. Once you start on this course, of course, it is hard to stop. So “Sam is going to San Francisco and Bob is going to Los Angeles” is Ksf, blG (non-first arguments could always move in front of the predicate for rhetorical reasons and so this poses no new issues) or sf^blG, with parentheses as needed in each case. These moves can be iterated to, say, Ksf.bDlvG: “Sam is going to San Francisco and Bob to either Los Angeles or Las Vegas.” The subordination of the components, though moved from the sentential to the nominal level remains clear. But, in a case like KsbGDfl “Sam and Bob are going to San Francisco or Los Angeles”, some doubt remains: are both of them going to one of the places or is each of them going to one, perhaps a different one: going back to the sentential level, DKsGf,bGf,KsGl,bGl or KDsGf,sGl,KDbGf,bGl. The usual possibilities are available: we might reorder the terms so that the topmost conjunction comes first and so on, or we might mark each conjunction for relative depth. This whole approach can even be extended to cases which are not exactly parallel: “John is going through Chicago or by auto” jGD4c5a. As noted earlier, the prefix notation is generally simpler here, since the same form can be used for sentences and most collapses (and markers added for nonsentential conjunction); the infix forms require new forms (typically related) for each sort of case: terms, predicates, term strings, and even subtypes within these.

When we say that Sam and Bob are going to San Francisco, there is no obvious suggestion that they are going together (whatever that means: on the same plane, in adjoining seats, for the same meeting, etc.), just that one is and the other one is, too. But sometimes it is significant that they are going together and that should be marked. The straightforward way of doing this, a term-maker (of extendable number of terms, since the group need not be just two) raises some problems. In standard FOPL, terms refer to individuals, though that is not very precisely defined. These new terms clearly refer to sets or, at least, to more than one individual simultaneously (a little excursion into Logic gets these two to amount to the same thing eventually). The fact that the collapsed sentential forms above also seemed to do so can be dismissed as being merely an appearance, not the ultimate situation. To be sure, the present new situation can, with some degree of plausibility, be reduced to the sentential case by a variety of devices: as a collapse of “Sam is going to San Francisco and Bob is going with him”, the latter predicate probably concatenating with the former, or , more simply, as an preposition “with Bob” attached to the main predicate and its argument raised somehow (but quite regularly). Neither of these feels quite right and so the term maker is used, iterated for more than two involved terms. These terms can, obviously, interact with other types, from above, so markers for relative scope are needed throughout.

There turns out to be a similar situation with predicates as with terms, one thing with two or more different components. So, along with blue and black balls that are some blue and some black, there are blue and black balls that are each partially blue and partially black. This seems, possibly because it uses “and” in English) to be a special case of combining predicates, different from the modifying sort and the sentential collapse, and so it also receives its own markers (related to those for set building above, perhaps). And, of course, devices for marking relative scope.

And scope is the last issue to deal with, the scope of those prenex 1-formula markers moved inward early on. The Loglans tend to be very careful with negation, keeping it clearly over compond sentences by attaching it to connectives and making appropriate changes in quantifiers and modals in the move. The situation with quantifiers and modals is less clear. A prenex quantifier tends to be moved to the first occurrence of its variables, which may be deep in some compound sentence. Though there is a rule about heeding changes brought about by negations, passage through a negation scope is not always obvious. It may be more obscure if the quantifier is caught in a collapse and is buried in a term, not even a sentence. So, while the general story is that the scope of a quantifier is the shortest complete sentence that contains all the occurrences of its variable, it may not be easy to see what that is. And reconstructing the sentence may only work up to equivalence, not the real original (not that that is a bad thing). For the restricted quantifiers, which have no variable to keep track of, the limits are the last pronoun that picks up that quantifier expression – and there may be several such in the course of a complex sentence. For the modals, there seem not to be strict rules but rather loose habits: a tense marked predicate refer to events at that time, subsequent ones (unmarked) refer to that same time or ones later as the eventss flow naturally. Subsequent marked ones place their event according to the mark relative to where the time was when the predicate came along. Except, of course, there are markers for radical shifts – to Now, for example, or some specified event. The case for non-tense modals is even less clear: one tendency is to take each as referring to the smallest possible sentence, the other is to take them as lasting until and countering modal comes along (and “in fact” to the ongoing “supposing”, say.)

In Summary,

The Loglans can be said to be spoken FOPL (or its current equivalent) in the sense that every sentence of such a language can be viewed as derived from a formula of FOPL by a series of transformations, which preserve meaning and structure, while reducing repetition and irrelevant items. I have sketched the major types of such moves above, skipping details, which are both very detailed sometimes and also have changed over the history of the Loglans and in the different separate languages. The crucial point is that these transformations are all reversible, that the original formula can, in principle, be recovered. A related feature is that the basic structure of that underlying formula is close to the surface, easy to see, since the transformation do not run deep.

Interestingly, the books about the Loglans (Loglan 1 and The Complete Lojban Language, preeminently) say little about all of this, but are focused more upon the relations of the language described to familiar languages (English first, of course). One would not really learn the grammar of FOPL from any of these books and so lines like “this structure in FOPL gets transformed to this structure in Loglan” do not play much of a role, either as instruction or explanation. We do learn that basic sentences consist of a predicate and a string of terms in order, without any special marking for the roles of the terms and that changing the order of some items is not to be done unless caution is used (with some English cases of what lack of caution could do). And that compound sentences come with a choice of representations, which will carry over to sentences of similar meaning which have compound predicates or compound terms. And we learn that certain sorts of delimitors can be dropped and others not in various situations, although this is based on problems about what comes next in a string of words, not about the end of structure as such. So, since the original transformation is not much discussed, the reversal plays no role; it is enough that the sentence is grammatical in this language, without considering whether it really represents FOPL. Originally, this is not surprising, since the scientific foundations for this sort of description only appeared at the same time as Loglan began (1955) and the Loglans lost their contact with academic linguistics (they never had much with field linguistics) in the early 1960s, when these theories began to make some way. On the other hand, the epigones of the Loglans were largely computer scientists, and so theories of computer languages, which are more static – not to say linear – dominate most theoretical discussions of the grammar of the Loglans. This theory has been directed mainly at producing parsers to derive a grammatical description linearly (YACC and PEG seem to be the current models).

But surprisingly, had the Loglans kept in contact with Linguistics outside the computer field, in Anthropology and Philosophy and just pure Linguistics, it would have found that it was in the forefront of the field. According to not a few schools of Linguistics, every sentence of every language is derived from a formula of some worthy successor of FOPL, by some appropriate form of the moves outlined above. The theoretical base is not, of course, strictly FOPL++, but an abstraction with essentially the same structure. And the moves will be different for each language, but basically of the same sort: shifting linear order, collapsing commonalities, eliminating detritus and so on. The major difference for natural languages, aside from generally a much larger set of rules, obligatory and optional, is that they are not required to be reversible. That is, a single linear string of words can be derived equally correctly from very different formulae. So, again I come to the point that the Loglans' interest lies entirely in its monoparsing.

The Role of Errors in the History of Loglans 1B

Step B: One-formula sentence makers

Sentence makers that require one formula (and perhaps something else) fall mainly into three groups: Negation, Modals, and Quantifiers (which also require a variable and possibly even another subordinate formula). In the standard presentations of FOPL, these go at the beginning of the sentence and their order is significant, since each attaches to the sentence formed by the sentence makers to its right back to the unmarked sentence. But beyond the structural significance of the order, there are clear semantic differences between, say “it is was the case that someone [then] was a witch” and “someone [now] was a witch”, that there used to be witches and that there are still former witches around. So moving one past the other is generally not allowed. On the other hand, many modals and quantifiers come in pairs, strong and weak, such that passing negation through them changes one to the other: ~1~ = 2, so ~1 = 2~ and conversely. Of course, in any case, the maker governs the whole sentence that follows, negating it, casting it into the relevant alternate reality, or binding all its free occurrences of the indicated variable.

But in adding these items to a Loglan sentence, we discover something more about what is bound up in the expressions “speakable”. We began by giving voice to the expressions of FOPL. Then we pruned the mass of punctuations to just those actually required to keep the structure fully marked, Now, something new seems to have been added, which seems at the moment to be loosely familiarity. That is, the changes here from formula to Loglan neither gives voice to new symbols nor eliminates detritus, but merely puts things in positions familiar from the L1s of likely learners of the language. In light of this, we can look back at the shift of the first argument from after to before the predicate and wonder. Was it just to make for a more efficient term formation or was it also to bring the sentences into something very like the familiar Subject-Verb-Object order of the L1s of many likely students of the new language?

What happens with Negation and Modals is that they are regularly shifted from the front of the sentence to a place immediately before the predicate. The original position is always possible but is, in fact, rarely used, even with compound sentences. Quantifiers are also shifted inward, from before the sentence (prenex), to the place in the body of the sentence where the bound variable first occurs. To be sure, this move is done carefully, in that, for negation and modals, the original order is preserved – though negation tends to move left when the standard dualities allow (but this is stylistic, without logical significance). Similarly, the order of quantifiers of different sorts is preserved, argument places being rearranged to preserve order and further rearrangements forbidden if that order would be disturbed. So, assuming “x loves y” is xLy, “Everybody has someone who loves them” is basically AxSy yLx, which becomes AxL[1,2]y (Loglan has no free variables; every variable is assumed bound particularly unless otherwise bound explicitly). The movement of the quantifier over quantifiers is also treated carefully, though there is some controversy (resolved in different ways every few years) about exactly how that works. The basic positions are that negation, while represented just before the predicate, is to be understood as as far left in the sentence as possible, and that negation is to be taken as being where it appears to be. In the first case, quantifiers (and modals) may have to through the logical place of the negation to get where they belong and so are transformed in the usual way. In the second view, only makers that came before the original negation need changing. Whichever way is current, the proper original form remains (subject to the position finally assigned to the negation), though it will be different in the two cases. Ax~Fy, on the first view, might be from ~AxSyFxy or Sx~SyFxy or SxAy~Fxy, which are all equivalent. On the second view, it would be from Sx~SyFxy, since Sx, but not Sy had to pass through the negation to get to its place. (We will later see cases where the negation comes at the end of a sentence and the matter is slightly more complicated, but still resolvable). In all these cases, then, the logical form is preserved – up to equivalence, anyhow. And, of course, the prenex version remains available (at slightly extra cost), just as the L1 probably contains the equivalent of “it is not the case that” and “it is possible that” and even “everything is such that”

The case is less clear with some modals that do not comes in pairs, like Past and Future. In standard Tense Logic, each of these is one of a pair of the usual sort: “somewhen in a past” and “somewhen in a future”, roughly speaking, but paired with “everywhen in pasts” and “everywhen in futures”. Thus, the usual negation movement is validated. But Loglan tenses are not quite like that. Nor are they like natural language tenses, built on a system of points (present, past, future and retrofuture) and vectors (before, now, and after). Rather they are (mea culpa in here somewhere) an uneasy compromise between the two: vectors to begin with, but once the vector is traced, its head become a point from which a further vector can extend. As a result, PFa sometimes says no more than that Fa was once true, but at other times it says that Fa was true at a particular, but unspecified, past time. And negation reflects this in that ~PFa is sometime unresolvable and sometimes means P~Fa (The easy analogy is when we say “There is a man in the house. He...”, so here “There was a time when … Then ...”). The best solution seems to be not to move tenses relative to negation, but the rules for this are neither so well spelled out nor so carefully followed. There are other modals with similar problem, “probably” and “certainly” for example, but for different reasons. Still, with care, the original structure is retained, if not quite transparently.

The case of quantifiers, and especially restricted quantifiers, is a more profound change. Not only are the quantifiers moved inward from their prenex position, but they change their grammatical status, Quantifiers are no longer a separate sort of thing – a 1-formula sentence maker – but become simply terms. Syntactically, there is little difference between AxFb and @G,Fb, and there is none in the case of the resolution of AG,Fb, from [AxGx]Fxb, where the values of the quantified variable are restricted to the non-empty class of Gs (the comma mark a separator between the predicate in the term and the one in the sentence, to prevent them being taken as a compound – on which more later). Quantifiers thus get involved in the place shifting predicate changes, where care has to be taken to prevent changing the relative order of different quantifiers, although terms generally can move about freely. As with negation and modals, these problems could have been avoided by leaving everything prenex, though arguably this would make sentences of any appreciable length harder to understand – and it is not a common pattern in natural languages (so maybe not something hard-wired in our understanding?).

Moving the quantifiers inward to the first place the bound variable occurs also means a loss of direct information about the scope of that quantifier (this is true for modals and negation as well, though the negation tends to get dealt with in various ways, using DeMorgan and the like). If the variable bound by a quantifier occurs in some place other than the first one, the connection has to be made. In the case of simple quantifiers, this is done by repeating the bound variable, so AxLxx becomes AxLx. But with the restricted quantifiers, the ordinary anaphoric pronoun resources must be used, the variable having been swallowed [AxGx]Fxx becomes AG,F[it], for some pronoun [it]. The Loglans have a plethora of pronoun systems, including assignable ones, and ones that can be used on the fly, depending on such factors as the initial letter of the predicate in a term or the structural position of the original term in its home sentence and so on. Despite this, it is not clear that every term can be represented unambiguously by a pronoun in every position, and certainly not clear that this can be done in a way that is easily interpretable by a hearer. Keeping the variables somehow would have eased this problem, which, admittedly, looms larger in theory than in practice. In any case, the scope of a quantifier is now determined to be the shortest sentence which contains the quantifier and all its anaphora (variables or pronouns). Aside from taking some care about what variables to use, this gives a practical solution, even if the sentence represented is only an equivalent to one started with.

The issue of repetitions arises for regular terms as well, of course, and does not have a variable solution although a variable has been hidden in going from FOPL to Loglan. With regular terms there is the option of simply repeating the term rather than using a pronoun, and this can be used when clarity advises it. Repeating a quantifier tends to make for confusion: is this just a repetition or is in a new quantifier with the same range? The convention is that “repeated “ quantifiers are actually new ones with the same range. So, AG,FAG is [AxGx][AyGy]Fxy, a very different claim from [AxGx]Fxx (“Everybody loves everybody, versus “Everybody loves himself”). (By the way, there is a version of FOPL in which term makers are in fact treated as quantifiers. In such a system – or even in the present one with minor changes, if the variables were not suppressed, a large part of the complications of the Loglans' various pronoun systems could be relieved by using the variables. This added “detritus” would pay other benefits as well, eliminating a major need for place-shifting and for the separation between predicates – assuming we could also eliminate the shift from VSO to SVO order. Of course, place shifting has other virtues, like providing easy ways to match familiar concepts with very general predicates, as “destination” is hidden in “go” as the second place, to be shifted to first for independent use. The need for predicate separation markers – and term enders, for that matter – does not seem to have any separate use and adds a variety of complications.)  

The Role of Errors in the History of Loglans 1A

The Role of Errors in the History of Loglans

Disclaimer: This is my personal account, from my point of view. The events involved are described as I remember them and interpreted them. The science involved is as I understand it and extrapolate from it. I have tried not to assign blame here; I think most of the errors were inevitable in the situations involved and were probably seen as errors only in corrected hindsight (if at all). Others may have different memories or interpretations, read the science differently, and disagree about what was an error, but this is my story. Bring your own salt.

I am dividing this essay into sections headed by various claims that were made for Loglan (and Lojban). Most of the errors discussed here attach more or less well to one of these claims, a few others can be sandwiched in. These claims have played a major role in the spread of interest in Loglans and have, in various ways, guided developments over the decades, so they may an informative and useful guide for presenting the problems.

Maxim One: Loglan is spoken Formal Logic (or Symbolic Logic or First Order Predicate Logic)

In many ways, this is the root error, from which the others derive. Most of the features later claimed for Loglans or sought for them derive from similar feature had by or claimed for FOPL (and it predecessors into the 19^th century and successors into the 21^st). The formulae of FOPL are syntactically unambiguous; there is only one way to analyze one. Translating an argument into such formulae provides a definitive way to demonstrate the validity of the argument (or its invalidity and where it goes wrong). Such translations also reveal misleading features of ordinary language, which give rise to many needless confusions and disagreements (and much metaphysics, some would say). Thus, FOPL is a valuable tool for rational discussion and for promoting understanding among people of different views, since it can be used to reveal the structures of any language.

Of course, the claim that some set of formulae was translation of a given argument is open to some disagreement; there is no automatic procedure for such translations as there is for judging validity of the translated set. Thus, the validity of many historic arguments (the Ontological, as a prime example) are still undecided. Of course, if the argument was given in FOPL – or an appropriately fleshed-out version of it – to begin with, this problem would disappear. So, the construction and use of such a language (partially realized for present purposes in careful ordinary German or English) became the goal of some logicians/philosophers from the '20s on. James Cooke Brown, the creator of Loglan, studied with Broadbeck at Minnesota and was at least thoroughly exposed to this Logical Positivist tradition. So, whether consciously or not, the “logically perfect language” played a role in his choices when he came to create an experimental language.

Another major factor was simplicity. FOPL does away with the many parts of speech and with the variety of tenses, moods and modes, and cases of familiar languages. Among content words there are only two parts of speech, terms and predicates, and, while there are a variety of subtypes (more as logic developed beyond the '50s) they all behave in the same way. Terms are divided into names, which stand for individuals (however that may be defined), and variables, which play a role in forming compound formulae, together, eventually, with compounded terms. Eventually there came to be terms of various sort, depending upon what was being counted as an individual, but this did not change the basic grammar. Predicates were divided according to the number of terms they required to make a formula (and, eventually, what types of terms). A(n atomic) formula, then, was just a predicate with the appropriate number of terms (of the right sorts) in order: Faxb, for example. No cases or sentential roles, no prepositions, no tenses, etc. Beyond this were the recursive steps involving -makers: a maker took a specified number of variables and formulae and returned a term or a formula, depending on its type (this gets somewhat more complicated later, but the basic pattern remains the same). Thus, &, a typical formula maker, takes two formulae and returns a new formula, their conjunctions: from Faxb and Gxc to (Faxb & Gxc). A, a variable binding predicate maker (quantifier), takes a variable and a formula to give a new formula, the universal generalization of the original formula: so from x and the previous formula we get Ax(Faxb & Gxc). The occurrence of x in this formula are now said to be bound by this quantifier, whereas before they were free. Similarly, @, an illustrative term maker, takes one variable and one formula and produces a new term, in which the variable is now bound: from x and Fx to @xFx, the salient F, say. The formulae used by a maker may be of any degree of complexity and the so may be the terms used in formulae. But the history of their construction and so their ultimate structure is always apparent: there is never any doubt about what formulae and variables (and whatever else) is involved at any level. At any stage in the development of to and beyond FOPL, the set of akers is closed and introducing new ones (beyond mere abbreviations) takes a rather dramatic effort, even though the pattern for defining them is clear throughout.

Given this, spoken FOPL would seem to be an easy thing to achieve. We need an open class of expressions for names and another for variables and another for predicates, perhaps with some special markers for different types of each sort. Then we get some special expressions for the various makers in use. Then we just rattle the formulae off as they are written, using the recommended expressions for the various symbols. Every logic teacher does this every day to talk about the formulae on the board:”For all ex both eff ay ex be and gee ex see”, for the sentence above. Clearly, this ad hoc technique is not quite good enough for our purposes, even leaving aside the fact that we don't have any meaningful expressions here yet. The three classes of expressions are not separated; they are all just letters and the capital/lower case distinction does ot come across in speech. Then there are the parentheses, the left one here pronounced “both”, looking ahead to the connective to follow, and the right one omitted altogether. With a different connective, the left parenthesis would have been differently pronounced, as “if” or “either” or “as”, say, so we need either to deal with them all the same (as “paren”, say) or make the nature of the enclosed compound sentence clearer at the beginning. (This is the way this problem arises in parenthesized infix – or Principia – notation; in other version the problem arises in different way, either by complexities on the connective to show how deeply it is buried in the compound, in labeled infix, or , in prefix – Polish – notation, by the need to mark the division between component sentences.). The right parenthesis can, in fact always be dropped in sentence compounding (though it is often a kindness not to), but needs to be reintroduced (and, indeed, extended) in the case of compounded terms with in a simple sentence: is Fa@xGxcb, composed of the predicate F and the terms a and @xGxcb or of that predicate and the terms a , @xGxc and b, or, indeed, of the terms a, @xGx, c, and b with predicate F? We must either enclose the formula in the composition in parentheses, if they are not already there, or else enclose the terms which follow a predicate in some sort of parentheses as well (F, say) and in either case, take care to pronounce both of these parentheses. (There are other, even more tiresome ways to deal with this problem, by always marking the number of places of each predicate, for example). But these can all be done rather cheaply: a few more words for constant characters, like right parentheses of various sorts (or, actually, for right parentheses, one sort is enough, if we put all of them in – but would we want to?).

The thought of a string of “end”s (say) at the end of every sentence is enough to show that spoken FOPL needs to be different from the written form, where adding a few right parentheses is a minor matter. So you need rules about when you can drop parentheses and when you can't and (probably) when you can but shouldn't, for clarity's sake. Or find another way around the problem. This is the first stage of the Loglans' adoption of FOPL.

Step A. Atomic sentences

Loglan took as its basic sentence type, before any frills, a predicate with a fixed number of places (given in the glossary but not marked in the word anywhere, despite regular suggestions to do so). Predicates had a definite (though increasingly complex as the years went by) phonemic structure, so were distinctive. Names also were distinctive in a variety of ways, while term variables were given by a finite list and rules for extending by subscripts. Composite terms were formed by replacing the first term (which Loglan had moved in front of the predicate – an insignificant change, to aFxb and xGc) by an operator which did the work of a 1-variable, 1-formula term maker and by attaching the arguments of the predicates the formula by explicit connectives, @G+c, for instance. This solved the first level of possible term misalliance, but for deeper ones, a right hand end marker for these term makers was used as needed (i.e., when more terms for a higher component followed). The problem about only using the first term of a predicate was solved a device creating new predicates in which the original first term and another term were swapped, from aFxb to xF'ab, for example, giving rise then to a term @F'+a-b, say. The situation calling for RHE markers is then something like H@xF' b>, which would first appear as H@F'+@G+c-b, where the predicate to which b is attached is unclear, hence H@F'+@G+c]-b, however pronounced. These and other changes created a new problem, when the predicate of a term might come directly before the predicate of a sentence, creating a potential ambiguity (predicate strings having been made legal – see later). One could make this a case where the RHE parenthesis of the term was used, but, since that could trigger a string of such parentheses, a separate divider was introduced. H@xFx becomes @F/H (or, still legal but riskier, @F]H). Since this automatically closes all the terms that went before, it suggests similar RHEs to close several terms, but not all without stringing out the term closers. This turns out to not help a lot, since learning different words for closing two, three, … terms is less efficient that just using two or three or … closers (having that many open terms at any point is probably bad style, but grammar has to apply to bad style as well as good).

The complexity of speaking even a relatively simple sentence makes one wonder if there is not some other way organize terms without loss of crucial information (what term occupies what place with which predicate). The answer so far is “No”. There are ways of reducing the reliance on order and devices for tagging terms according to what predicate they go with, but these all introduce yet more essentially empty and repetitive items, which the present complexities sought to reduce. A case system, meant both to relieve the requirements for a fixed order and to give some meaning to the various positions – which now have meaning only if you remember the definition of the predicate correctly – does not simplify the need to shift order to make a term nor does it help enough with the problem of dropped places (upcoming) to be worth the cost. It is not clear that the Loglans' solution to making this structure speakable is the simplest or shortest or clearest one, but alternate proposals so far have offered no obvious advantages and have often had clear downsides. So let us call this a success: it keeps all the essential information but gets rid of as much superfluous verbiage as possible. That it is often notoriously easy to get wrong, whether by (unstylishly) leaving in unnecessary RHEs or by (disastrously) leaving out needed ones, is a problem for eventual textbooks. And one that gets worse as we get deeper into the language.

In making a language based in this way on FOPL, another inelegance arises. When using FOPL to transcribe arguments from another language, we naturally pick predicates that exactly fit the situation we are dealing with. But, in a Loglan, we have fixed predicates with fixed places. So, to deal with a particular situation, we may not need all places that the predicate supplies (or we may need one not supplied, but that is a later problem). For instance, the predicate briefly rendered “go” is actually a five-place predicate “1 goes to 2 from 3 along route 4 using mode of travel 5”, so to say just “Sam goes to San Francisco” leaves three places unfilled. Since we don't at the moment care about what goes in there in fact (from here on Southwest by airplane, say), we don't want to say anything more (as we don't in English). The stock logical move in this case would be to bind each of these unused places with a particular quantifier, “some” (and, so, a number of at least implicit parentheses) Sx*Sy*Sz*sGfxyz***. The Loglans can do that, of course, but that seems to be defeating the purpose of making this as much like other spoken languages as possible while keeping it as rigorous as FOPL. So, the Loglans have three responses, each ultimately going back to the official form. One is to introduce a new predicate based on the original but having on the interesting places (it holds of the mentioned things just in case there are things for the other places so that the original predicate holds for all of them together). The second is to insert a dummy term in the unfilled slots. And finally, and most pleasingly, the slots are just left empty. This last is the standard when the empty slots are all at the end, with no intervening filled slots. The dummies (there are several, for some reason) are used when a filled slot comes after an unfilled slot, though other devices can also be used with just the blanks. So “Sam is going by Southwest”, officially SxSySzsGxywz, might be sG- -w- (- for a dummy insert) or sG- -w or sG4w (where 4 is a marker that the next term is, in fact, the fourth one for the predicate) or, modifying the predicate, sG[1,4]w (dropping the other terms) or sG<2>w (rearranging the terms by exchanging the 2^nd and 4^th), dropping the unused final terms in each case. Of course, restoring the FOPL original requires knowing the places of the original predicate so that the quantifiers can be properly placed, as close to the predicate as possible. These unmentioned quantifiers will come to raise questions in going beyond atomic sentences. 

In the opposite direction, predicates may be extended by adding terms. Although the general idea of prepositions (or cases) to give overt meaning to predicate places was rejected, it is retained for situations where a predicate needs to be extended beyond its usual sense. So a new term is introduced by a marker that says what its role is to be. It can be inserted into the physical string of arguments at almost any place, though traditionally goes at the end. Similarly, the possibility, briefly mentioned above, of a “preposition” to indicate which place of a predicate an argument fills is fully realized in the Loglans, though rarely used. The prefixes to the predicate that exchange the first place and another can be combined to create any order of arguments we want. However, these combinations are often long and not transparent for some rearrangements, so the prepositions are a better choice in speakability terms. Both these prepositional structures behave just like the regular arguments. In particular, they attach to the predicate of a term with the same ties as other arguments. They can even, with some adjustments be made the term replaced by a term-maker. And they are closed off just like other terms.At this point is is fairly clear, if not rigorously demonstrated, that the Loglans' reading of atomic sentences does represent the structure completely and accurately.   

Sostematiko -- a small language,

[Disclaimer:  I am no good at all in Sostematiko and fairly good in toki pona.  This surely colors my view of things when I step away from "objective facts."]

One of the virtues of toki pona (tp) is that it has brought the search for minimal languages into focus: any such search must now make explicit comparisons with tp, and most acknowledge tp as an inspiration.  tp is not a perfect minimal language, of course, It famously could make do with two fewer vowels with a single vocabulary change and with two fewer consonants using only a couple minor changes in phonological rules.Its vocabulary of 120 (give or take) words contains at least one redundancy and a couple of cases with dubious claims to be in a minimal set.  Even some cases in its already restricted grammar could easily be handled within the slightly modified general rules.  And, of course, there are some doubts about how much can be said in tp -- enough to claims "universal" coverage as the idea of a minimal language requires.  But tp is still the standard.

Sostematiko arose from the quest by the author, Giannes Kenanides (he writes it as Giannhs Kenanidhs to stress the long e sounds) for a simplified Greek, now presented as Free Greek. Starting from the limited basic vocabulary and grammar of that project, he moved to a language separated from the particularities of Greek (aside from vocabulary) to find a general minimal language which would overcome the perceived shortcomings of tp.

The phonology of Sostematiko is clearly non-minimal in absolute terms since it adds to that of tp the voiced versions of the stops and s: /b, d, g/ and /z/, and also /f/ and /x/ (voiceless velar fricative, Grm ch),  tp /l/ is replaced by /r/.  In all, five vowels (as in tp) and thirteen consonants (against 7).  Sostmatiko syllables are much more complicated than those of tp, since both consonant clusters, initial and final, and diphthongs are permitted,  Stress is not specified nor marked,  Word length varies indefinitely, and, indeed, the official notion of a words is not fixed, since the language is claimed to be interpretable as isolating, agglutinating or paradigmatic (but the actual presentatrion differs somewhat in these different forms).

The vocabulary is entirely Greek, though a mixture of various stages and subject to processes of simplification (the distinction between long and short vowels is lost, for example, and that between theta and tau and lambda and rho). There are 220 root words (against tp's 120) but, as in Esperanto,  these rarely occur alone in a text, but rather come with additional bits marking nouns, active and passive verbs and adverbs, as well as other affixes, both grammatical (subjects, plural, object) and derivational (though all in theory capable of occurring, in somewhat different guises, as separate words).  One can take this as adding 100 words to tp or as multiplying tp;s total by up to a factor of 10,  On the other hand, they are, for the most part, somewhat familiar, turning up in English words with familiar meanings (even if not always obvious).

In terms of minimality and general language efficiency, the former view is probably fairer.  While the number of separate words (in the usual format) is much greater, the grammar is simplified but keeps a close parallel with tp.  Thus, Sostematiko is basically SVO, like tp, but does not need either 'li' for V or 'e'' for O, since (in the basic case) everything before the first verb (marked by '-i' or '-eti' is Subject) and the noun after it (marked, like the subject, with the '-o' of noun) is Object, Similarly, in at least some dialects, the difference between adjectival and nominal modifiers of nouns is marked, eliminating an ambiguity in tp, where, for example, 'ilo jan' might be either a human machine (robot) or a person's tool, depending upon whether 'jan' is taken as (as we would say in a language with nouns and adjectives as normative) a noun or an adjective.  Further, the existence of passives -- for all that allows the avoidance of responsibility ploy -- avoids the frequent roundabout constructions full of dummy references that are needed in tp.

While Sostematiko is SVO and AN, it allows for SOV forms (using the optional '-n' object).  In particular, it allows relative clauses among the noun modifiers and places them in front of their noun, typically using the SOV - perhaps even OSV -- form to mark the boundaries, relative and verb. Having relative clauses rather than separate sentences complicates the grammar but arguably improves rapid understanding (especially since, in tp, the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses is not well represented).  The variant orders also allow disambiguating cases where verb phrases directly modify nouns (OVS as a noun phrase), which are ambiguous in tp.
Sostematiko allows roots to be compounded, eliminating another ambiguity of tp.  In tp, word strings may well come to have a special meaning as a whole: 'jan pona' as "friend" , to take the stock example.  But they always remain word strings and so capable of still having their basic meaning, "good person',  in this case.  Fusing the idioms into words (the mythical 'janpona', /jambona/) would eliminate an array of alternate readings with low probabilities and never intended (preediting does that work now, but is, of course, unreliable).

Yet these advantages come at a cost in learning and reading.  Once one has learned the vocabulary of tp, one never has to puzzle out the words of the text, whereas Sostematiko words often need analysis before one can go on to place them correctly in the sentence.  Even if the analysis is simple, the fact is that the words often cannot be recognized at a glance (or even in typoed format) as they can in tp. There even appear to be some words that have false, but plausible, derivations from  reasonable but not actual words, which all leads to chases through the dictionary and the creation of new words.

Many of the problems I have experienced with Sostematiko (and I have to say that, while it is apparently ahead of tp on points as useful language, I find it nearly impossible to use) I attribute to the present lack of even moderate teaching material, say anything as good as the various lessons for tp.  Learning it is like trying to get Esperanto with only a glossary and the 16 rules but no -- or very few -- bits of expounded text or examples.  There are a handful of texts with translation aids, but little in the way of general principles of interpretation.  As a result, each new phrase that is not totally literal is a puzzle to be solved.  I've found that, where possible, translating into tp helps quite a bit ('ano membrano' , "up sheet" becomes 'lipu sewi' and immediately recognizable as "holy book". which at least fits the context, though may not turn out to be right).  But such translations are not always possible and are subject still to the different spirits of the languages.  The problem with Sostematiko is that so little of its spirit is yet revealed.  As it emerges, perhaps Sostematiko will become a major contender in the small-language field.

Lojban is monoparsing

Someone has compiled the following list virtues of Lojban

Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
Lojban is designed to be neutral between cultures.
Lojban grammar is based on the principles of predicate logic.
Lojban has an unambiguous yet flexible grammar.
Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguously resolves its sounds into words.
Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exceptions.
Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
Lojban has been demonstrated in translation and in original works of prose and poetry.

These are put forward as reasons to learn Lojban.  But, in fact, unless you are looking or a language that is free of syntactic ambiguity, none of these virtues obviously favor Lojban, nor do they collectively, unambiguity aside.  In fact, many constructed languages, well-known or not, have the feature listed here that are not connected with unambiguity in as high a degree as, or higher than, Lojban. For most cases, Esperanto will do as an example.  

Esperanto has been used by people in communication with each other for well over 100 years and has a vast literature in translation as well as in original works, far more of both that Lojban does (and had that much already before it was as old as Lojban is now).  Esperanto is as likely to be available to computers as any natural language, but Lojban has the advantage of monoparsing: that there is only one grammatical reading of any sentence, a clear advantage.  This is why, of course, monoparsing is the essential Lojban virtue.

Esperanto is a SAE language in many ways, also andrist, heterosexist etc. etc., so not neutral in many respects.  Lojban is also SAE in the grammatical sense, but not in vocabulary (as Esperanto is) nor in most other respects.  However, most constructed languages are SAE in this way and many are as neutral as Lojban in the ways Lojban is neutral.  Neutrality means primarily that no cultural categories are compulsory (and, secondarily, that all are about equally permitted).  So, for the usual examples, Lojban (and any number of other constructed languages) do not force gender distinctions grammatically but permit them to be made semantically as wanted and similarly for singular/plural and for tense/aspect (Esperanto does force singular/ plural and tense and makes a clear gender distinction without actually making it compulsory.  It also has a case system, which is somewhat suspect, for some reason.).  This is mostly a matter of vocabulary and an analytic syntax, which many conlangs can provide.  Lojban's deriving its vocabulary from a collection of languages from various parts of the world does little to improve this situation (the claim that this derivation process makes the vocabulary easier to learn across cultures has never been tested but flies in the face of considerable anecdotal evidence at least.  I note that this internationally based vocabulary is not mentioned as a virtue.).  Even toki pona -- not usually an exemplary language for these discussions -- can match all Lojbans advantages here,

The claim that Lojban's grammar is based on symbolic logic is often made but never really demonstrated, A logician looking at anything beyond a very simple Lojban sentence would be hard pressed to see what the connection was and the simple sentences look pretty much like simple sentences in any SAE language (but then, where did logicians from England and France, Germany and Italy get there models, after all?).  The virtue of being "spoken predicate logic" (JCB) is exactly that predicate logic is monoparsing and, if Lojban really is that, however disguised, then it has achieved that goal.  Unfortunately, it is not clear that it is that, since the grammars written for Lojban have not be attached in any formal way to the language of Logic, but tend to be linear.  As tfor the other supposed virtue of being a language based on Logic, that learning it will make you (or help you) be logical, one has to ask whether learning French will make you a better cook or whether logicians as a classs are more logical than other folks (go to an ASL meeting before you answer).

I suppose that Lojban's flexibility is demonstrated by its use, in which case, Esperanto's is even better demonstrated.  Again, toki pona, in about half the time, as a reasonably good demonstration available, as do many other conlangs.  Lojban would be appreciably more flexible and fluid did it not have always to check back that it had not violated the monoparsing rules.  Monoparsing is very expensive in terms of rules and vocabulary, since very minor deviations can either ruin the whole or at least give the wrong results (dropping a right end marker completely changes a sentence, even when the intended -- but now missed -- meaning remains clear).

Phonetic spelling is pretty much a given in conlangs.  It is required for Lojban -- along with a very restrictive set of morphophonemic forms -- for monparsing to work from the bare speech stream, not just from the word level.  The resolution into words is also a part of this process.  Other languages work more or less from the word level, perhaps allowing (even occasionally encouraging) some uncertainty about word boundaries (puns in Lojban work at a different level).

It is a little hard to compare Lojban's grammar with those of other conlangs (let alone natural languages), because Lojban (and Loglan) are virtually unique having actual full-scale grammars in a linguistic (or closely related) sense.  Since the aim is monoparsing, a good deal of Lojban grammar is devoted to ensuring that.  It has been estimated that, were monoparsing not required -- merely,say, as good a job of combating ambiguity as English --  Lojban's grammar would be half its current size.  But that estimate is pulled out of nowhere. The same can be said for estimates of how long it takes to reach what level of competence (however defined) for various languages -- the measure of simplicity that seems to be left.  Anecdotal reports, however, make Lojban much harder than Esperanto or toki pona at both the basic and more advanced levels (indeed, places basic Lojban at near the same level as advanced forms of the others).  Partly this is surely due to the vocabulary issue, since toki pona vocabulary is tiny and Esperanto vocabulary is largely familiar, while Lojban vocabulary is totally new (has its old well hidden).  It may be, of course, that there is a level of Lojban that can be reached in a reasonable time that can be reached in other languages only with great difficulty, but it is not clear that this is so nor what it might be.  No one clims that you can be more profound in Lojban than in Esperanto, I think (though maybe than in toki pona).

Lojban does have a well developed (albeit complex) system for word construction, perhaps better worked out than other languages.  But other languages seem to manage to deal with more notions than are in their basic vocabularies:  Esperanto has a variety of word formation techniques as well as compounding (the main Lojban system) and borrowing (also in Lojban but constrained by the morphophonemics. needed for monoparsing) .  Even toki pona creates new compound phrases freely and allows them attain the status of semantic units.  Esperanto can clearly go as far as Lojban; toki pona can apparently go as far as it needs to -- not so far, but then it starts with only 10% of the vocabulary.  

Exceptionless regular rules of grammar are a norm in conlangs, so that is not Lojban's uniqueness.  On the other hand, monoparsing means that there have to be separate rules for various cases which might not otherwise have been separated.  thus what in one language might be covered by a single rule (folding together the differences in two parallel sentences, for example) might in Lojban take a number of separate rules, depending on the exact character of the pieces involved (NP is different from VP is different from S is different from String is...). Thus, while the rules have no exceptions, there are still a greater number of cases to cover.  

The last three claims are again about what has been done in the language.  As in such cases mentioned earlier (in fact, these are essentially repetitions and look like padding the resume), any claim Lojban has here was met and bettered by Esperanto in the beginning of the 20th century. toki pona has more modest results, of course, but much more modest claims.  Other languages come somewhere in between, largely a matter of the amount of work their users have put into them (and, of course, just the number of users).  But many have the potential to do as well as Lojban, given the effort.

In summary, then, Lojban is nothing special among conlangs, if you ignore monoparsing.  If you are not interested in monoparsing, there are many other langugees which will give you Lojban's other virtues and generally more simply than Lojban does, since monoparsing is expensive in terms of grammar and vocabulary, of easily forgotten little word and very finely differentiated rules.

 

In Another Head

The Happy Raccoon (a Russian? Lojbanist who goes by {gleki arxokuna}) pointed to Conlang Quest on Tumblr, which had just done a review of Lojban, following up on a half-dozen earlier reviews of conlangs. Since this is very like the project here and even covers much the same languages, I am going to be rude and comment on it more or less directly. I agree with much of what it says, but find some of the assumptions and expressions infelicitous at least.

 "My quest for the perfect constructed language." The writer's epigraph presupposes that all conlangs are for the same purpose (else how could there be a single perfect one). This either ignores the tradition of three (or so) types of conlangs or has a specific type raised above the rest as "the real conlangs." The latter is most likely, since, at least until recently, books that dealt with conlanging at all dealt with auxlangs or even replacement languages, "One Language for the World" as an old book (the first one I remember reading on the subject, so probably at least the early '50's) had it. And, indeed, the author says in his first essay

 "This blog shall serve as my review and quest to learn a second language. By “second language” I obviously mean: “Constructed Language” (aka conlang) as all natural languages manage to piss me off. Especially those (most Romance) with which the majority of nouns have an associated gender. (See French… how da fuq is evening masculine, but night is feminine?) I’m also looking for a logical conlang. Something that is a reasonable blend of brevity and unambiguity. In fact, brevity is secondary to ease of learning and communication."

 The second paragraph does suggest that he is interested in an engelang, particularly an unambiguous one, but this is apparently a secondary matter. It does, perhaps, explain why some of the languages he looks at are distinctly not auxlangs (in intention, however they may be used by their followers). The ease-of-learning is also an interesting one in both auxlangs and engelangs intended for experiments -- and is one of the great imponderables in this game.

His next move is to cite one of the most misleading Whorf quotes   "Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.“  But the problems with that are for another time, since it does not play a role here.

The author's first review is of -- inevitably -- Esperanto.  With more than a century of criticism, Esperanto's "problems" are well known and discussed, both presented and defended. From this heap the author chooses to focus on the spelling system, the declension of nouns, and syntactic ambiguity,in keeping with his declared interest.

The section on the alphabet and spelling suggests a lack of appreciation of the difference between phonetics and phonemics, which lack becomes more apparent in later reviews.  Fundamentally, he seems to want each letter of the Esperanto (in this case) alphabet to stand for exactly one IPA symbol/sound.  He thus misses two important points:1) within a language, "the same sound" (phoneme) may be pronounced in different ways in different environments, even by the same speaker, so no one IPA symbol or corresponding letter of the language's alphabet will serve as phonetically correct and 2) whether something is a single sound or a string in a given language depends upon other factors in the language.
1) What sound should the letter r in Esperanto represent, for example, in the speech of a New Englander: retroflex or "missing"? Which occurs is predictable and totally regular, so having two symbols -- to match with the IPA -- is a waste.  On the other hand, in a different language, the two sounds might need different letters since the occurrence of the two sounds is not predictable but actually differentiates two different words.
2) Whether using c to represent the sound /ts/ is a proper choice depends on several factors.  He points out that Eo. 'facila' sounds just like /fatsila/ but the point seems only to be that it should, therefore, be spelled the same.  Except that, if there were an Eo. word "fatsila" that was distinct from "facila" this might be a case for arguing that the two should be spelled differently (especially if there were many such cases).  The actual situation in Eo. seems to be that the single symbols solution is a choice: there are affricates which form a group on their own, patterning neither like simple consonants nor like other consonant clusters nor like vowel-modified consonants.  I don't know what considerations led to the chosen solution but it is clearly as easily justified as an alternative (even if the practices of familiar languages are allowed to play a role in the decision).
The remarks about the complex of extra symbols (and the unmentioned under use of the Latin alphabet) and of typewriter workarounds are just the standard stuff, with which everyone either agrees or gives the standard defenses.

In talking about declensions, the author slips by saying that Eo, has a possessive case, presumably meaning an objective one.  He does not note the advantages this has for freer word order, probably because he would not generally like free word order, which interferes with clarity (some say).  The principled attack on plurals, can be met in the usual ways: that no knowing whether there is one or several of a things is practically at a different level from not knowing whether there are two or twenty and that the differences can all be dealt with by using numbers or other quantity markers (but note that 2 on up still requires a plural in Eo.)

As for ambiguity, the author sees problems with homonyms, though these are very hard to avoid in human language (talk about all the possible words never seem to take non-combinatorial factors into account) and also even possible desirable -- for joke, if nothing else (the author thinks jokes are a problem, apparently, though the one about a giraffe always having a companion is pretty bad).  The problem of syntactic ambiguity remains, and is, of course, central to the authors quest.  The one example he cites is enough to make his case against virtually every language (though not exactly against Eo., since he gives only the English).

The review of Ido consists only of commenting on how it improves on Eo. as far as spelling (and the alphabet generally) goes, while still mixing phonetics and phonemics.  He notes also that Ido avoids the sexisn (mentioned by a commenter) of Eo., not making all items with definite feminine referents formed by adding "in" to the presumably masculine basic forms.

Now comes a brief interlude on a priori and a posteriori languages, which gets the fact essentially correct.  What is does not mention (nor does it cover it later, when it is relevant) are cases like Logjam, which don't fit handily into either pattern.  The vocabulary in these cases is based on that of natural languages but subjected to transformations which appear to be a priori (or a posteriori from something other than languages -- learning theory, say).  These languages achieve something in the way of cultural neutrality by bringing in many languages (and making them unrecognizable) but claim some of the familiarity of a posteriori  languages since the familiar pieces are still there to aid language learnin (this claim has nver been substantiated -- or even tested, so far as I know).

Next, a brief review of  Interlingua, not a language I know much about, nor, assuming this review is accurate, care to.  The review makes a number of claims without giving any data to back them up (this is universal in these reviews) but they mostly seem plausible.  The language is easy to learn (i.e., the vocabulary is European as is the syntax) and it uses the Latin alphabet alone.  The objections are that it is syntactically ambiguous (which follows from the above) and that the spelling is not phonetic (or, apparently, even phonemic -- it is not clear) and that there are homonyms.

Back on familiar ground, a review of toki pona, which begins with the claim that no thought went into its construction because it is so thoroughly ambiguous (syntactically).  Of course, this just means that the inventor did not think like the the author here.  It may have been (and there is some evidence for this) that the inventor spent some time thinking about testing for the extent that context could be trusted to deal with ambiguities to still present a clear message.  In which case, while the result may be unsatisfying to the author, the remark is unjustified.  But the examples (!) given are not about ambiguity at all, but about vagueness or generality.  [rant follows] The fact that a word in one language has several different translations in another (here tp and E.) does not mean that the word is ambiguous in its own language.  It may stand for a concept broader or more diverse than any of the other language's (partial) translations.  Thus, the tp 'suno' presents a concept that centers of light or brightness and so gets particularized as "sun" or "day" or "shiny", as appropriate.  If what is appropriate is not clear, then other words or features of context can be added or pointed to to get the message across.  To be sure, there is probably a context in which 'suno pona'  "good light" (but not, by the way, "great sun" 'suno suli' nor "thanks, sun" 'suno o, pona') rather than "Good day!", but not, generally, as a greeting (and, if there were a greeting case, it would come to the same thing with the assumed interests of the interlocutors).  [end]  The one thing the author likes about tp is, alas, not in it at all.  He takes a piece of the inventor's rhetoric and lays it on the language.  tp is not inherently more honest than any other language (nor dishonest, cf. Newspeak)  It is as easy to lie or obfuscate or euphemize in tp as any other language.

And then aUI, a surprising choice, since it doesn't get much press.  While I don't think tp began life as a auxlang, aUI is a mixed case.  In form it is a Philosophical Language, usually thought of as a type of engelang. But, since the point of such a language is that every word should be defined by its form  -- you can read the definition off if you understand how the word is constructed, it is natural to think that everyone should use this language, as then all misunderstandings would be avoided, etc., etc.  So, maybe even a replacement language rather than an auxlang.

The review like the phonetic use of the alphabet in aUI, though it gets the number wrong -- there are 41 sounds, or at least 32; the nasalized vowels (numbers) are omitted.(He also doesn't comment on the proper aUI alphabet nor the supposed naturalness of each sound for the concept it represents, two fun weak points in the language.)  The possibilities for ambiguity even in individual words is noted, but not explored (words are cited with their official meaning and said to be open to other interpretations, but none are actually suggested).  The grouping problem, for example, where taking different clusters can lead to very different results and there is not systematic way to choose one pattern rather than another.  The later problem of ordinary syntactic ambiguity isn't mentioned but can be taken as a given, I suppose, until we come to Logjam.  The prior problem that the supposed unchanging basic concepts either change or are much broader than is apparent and particularize in unspecified ways (apparently inconsistently, even -- but, since the factors involved are unspecified, it is hard to say) is not mentioned.  But I don't think it is quite as bad as Marklar.

The origin story is taken seriously even though it began as a short story and became biographical only later (cf.  some of Jesus' parable that become part of the story later).  In any case, the obvious problem that the language is bound up with the Latin alphabet and decimal numbers and other features of human (indeed, Iowa) culture militates against the story being true.

So, while we are dealing with strange languages and conceptually precise one, there comes a review of Ithkuil, probably the most difficult conlang with any traction at all.  "Phonetic script" but far from the Latin alphabet (60 sounds!).  Of course, with so many sounds it is hard to pronounce them all distinctively and correctly (the author has trouble outside a narrow range of English apparently from comments elsewhere) and the lack of devices that print the script or of an adequate Latin alphabet version make it undesirable.

Precision easily obtained.  "Semantic ambiguity" dealt with but not, necessarily, solved.
It is not exactly clear what is meant by "semantic ambiguity" here.  In some cases, it seems to be just referential ambiguity: does "the table" refer to this one or that one both available in the context (cf. "Flash stowed up to Ming.  He struck him").  At other times it stands for other kinds of specificity: whether a person who fell was pushed or jumped or just lost support, for example.  Ithkuil deals with the latter case in particular and many other (similar?  in what way?) ones but does not present a general solution to whatever is taken to be the problem here.  The various chairs is famously a pragmatic problem, not semantic at all.  The second does not seem to be ambiguity at all but appropriate specificity, again a pragmatic not a semantic issue. And neither has anything to do homonymy, the earlier version of semantic ambiguity.

And so, not quite finally, to Lojban, a language which seems to come closest to the authors criteria as expressed in various places.  He quite rightly notes that it comes from Loglan, but not so accurately says that Loglan is defunct.  He claims Lojban has about 5k users, which is way high, but says correctly that this is a medium sized language (though it may be -- ignoring Eo. -- a fairly large one, even if it is less than 1k; claims about user size are very unreliable).

He likes the sound/letter correspondence, of course, even if he doesn't understand what it means (i.e., that it does not match with IPA).  And, of course, he likes the fact that Lojban avoids syntactic ambiguity.  He is surer of this than is strictly warranted, of course, for, while it is true that every grammatical sentence in official Lojban has a unique parse and thus is not subject to any of the problems of the sort he exemplifies in English, it is also true that a good many sentences actually presented as Lojban are either not grammatical or officially mean something quite different from what the speaker (and usually the hearer) take them to mean. At the informal level toward which the official grammar strives, to be as clear as the formulas of symbolic logic, the sentences of even official Lojban are defective, typically having problems finding the right ends of structures.  The best that can be said is that Lojban is amazingly good at this, for all that it could be better by being simpler.

The main complaint about Lojban is about its vocabulary, that it is unfamiliar.  The claim that it is based on familiar languages and contain useful guides to familiar words is ignored (in fact, denied).  This is probably realistic if not accurate; the relationships are so obscure and unreliable as to be useless for language learning (or no more helpful than totally casual mnemonics).

The other main complaint is that the grammar is unfamiliar.  Although the author seems to be an engineer, he does not seem familiar with either math or programming, either of which would make the grammar of Lojban more accessible (not that it is really that different from ordinary languages except for the oddity of the meanings -- rather than the grammar -- of various places).  The average Lojbanist is a computer geek, after all, rarely a humanist or even a social scientist.  That may also account for the lousy study materials (user manuals, anyone?).

And so to the last review, Ceqli  (cheng'li, I gather), said to be derived from Loglan again, but not one that I know -- or at least remember.  So I can't say much about it,  About the comments, I note that "fowl" is not Latinate (picky, picky!) but that the use of more familiar forms does make part of Ceqli easier than Lojban, while requiring some other fussinesses later to get the clarity of compounds and structure which come naturally in Lojban.  Which is ultimately simpler is just not clear.

The author's main objection seems to be to phonology/spelling again, focusing on the q for the velar nasal, which he claims he cannot distinguish from a the same sound followed by a voiced velar stop.  I am unsure what dialect he speaks or whether he just has not paid much attention speech sounds for all he talks about them.  He has deleted the main remarks, but they and the retraction are not encouraging about his value when discussing phonology.  (He says that q should be a digraph, going against his earlier one sound/one letter rule!)

Though he like the familiarity of the forms of Ceqli words he still manages not to understand them and attributes to the creator (and Logjam's) the desire to keep everything unintelligible, rather than the well-documented goal of making things (analytically) clear.

Ceqli apparently does not do some job as well as Lojban, but just what it is is unclear from the brief comments
 Ceqli does not address ambiguity in syntax as Lojban does. In Lojban, one can group a “bridi phrase” to separate it from a continuation of arguments to the previous bridi, but in Ceqli you can only group subject, verb, and object phrases on a single level.
This seems a major point, so either (as he says) the information about Ceqli is incomplete at a crucial point or the review has found a major flaw whatever it is).


Finally, a summary, "Logical" Language Criteria.  I pass over the abuse of the word "logical" here, which not even the quotes can evade, to look at the actual cases.

1:1 match of letters and IPA.  No, 1:1 match of letters and phonemes of the language and what those are is not something to be gotten by looking at the IPA.  This muddle runs throughout these reviews.  It is useful to have the match, though not essential: one cluster per sound would work as well, provided that cluster culd not be generated in some other way.  And phonemes may be more than one IPA character long if that works out best (the arguments for Pinyin q are pretty convincing within Chinese, though other solutions also work and could be -- have been -- worked into systems as well).  (as noted earlier c and ts don't contrast in Eo., so there is no problem there).  Note that the freedom of Lojban from ambiguity has virtually nothing to do with the 1:1 correlation, which is not a matter of grammar.

Syntax with one interpretation.  Yes, important to have for some purposes  (machine translation, say), useful to have in any case, provided it is not too costly in terms of other complexities.  It is arguable that Lojban has gotten so complex that the value of ambiguity freedom has been overtaken, especially since it so often results in not saying what you mean (though perfectly grammatically) or missing grammaticality altogether.  Either while still being understood.  If the quest is for a language with this feature, then something that simplified Lojban but kept its power would be worth pursuing.   The examples given of failures of this feature are realistic but not completely convincing, since they fail to take into consideration features like juncture and prosody, but this does not totally undermine the general point.

Words have one distinct meaning.  The combinatorics about the number of "words" is largely irrelevant, since there are countless factors (beyond the uselessness of "xwqc" as a word) that restrict the possibilities down from the assumed limit.  "Semantic ambiguity" used again for referential ambiguity and then for generality and this -- whatever it finally is -- is said to be inevitable (true for generality: can't have a name for everything, less so for referential ambiguity).  Lojban is surprisingly bad on referential ambiguity at the simplest - naphoric level: it can deal with it but requires complex and easily mistaken techniques.