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[qwertyuiopas]

Ugh, misunderstandings.

No matter how many times I have stated it, you people completely ignore the fact that from the start I never intended to be the only one working on it, that I never thought it could totally replace anything, and that I knew enough to do it entirely myself.

[G-Flex]

There's still a problem there.

Idiomatic phrases like "Time flies" occur for a very good reason. After all, it's not as if English couldn't already represent the concept, so why would a technically-ambiguous (although not in practice) term like that arise?

It's because idiomatic, metaphorical language like that is good for understanding what someone means by something. "Flies" is associated with a certain physical process that doesn't apply to time in a technical sense, but is applied analogously in order to describe a perception of time moving fast... hell, I'm having trouble even describing what "time flies" means, because it's so easily understood idiomatically. Weird little quirky constructs like that, where the meaning of one thing is applied by analogy and association to something completely different, are important to language. You could get rid of it, but people would end up doing it again anyway eventually, or else it never would happen in the first place. The connotations and images people conjur up when they use language are just as important as the technical definitions of the words themselves.

Aye. It's like that old logical fallacy.

"God is love. Love is blind. Therefore God is blind."

Following if A = B and B = C, A = C.

But that's silly. The "B" term here refers to two different kinds of love in two different statements. The thing is, if spoken language weren't full of ambiguities, then this kind of fallacy would be impossible.

But I like English just the way it is.

Yeah, and you provided another example of important idiomatic language: "Love is blind". Sure, it doesn't technically make sense for the literal definition of the word "blind", but its nonliteral value is extremely concise and well-understood.

[Armok]

Except "Lovers are blind" would work just as well and make sense.

By the way, if I remember correctly something being metaphorical has a suffix or prefix or such in Loyban, so there would in effect be one word for literal medical blindness, and one for metaphorical blindness to waht is going on.

[Vester]

Except "Lovers are blind" would work just as well and make sense.

By the way, if I remember correctly something being metaphorical has a suffix or prefix or such in Loyban, so there would in effect be one word for literal medical blindness, and one for metaphorical blindness to waht is going on.

Yeah, but Lojban precludes idiomatic language (which, I'm pretty sure, is what it's for in the first place). Anyway, this is discussing a new languuge for the Internet. Would unambiguity be a good thing? What about jokes, poetry, and stories?

[G-Flex]

Why exactly does the internet itself need its own language? I can understand a constructed, global written language, but it would need to be as universal as possible.

[JoshuaFH]

Except "Lovers are blind" would work just as well and make sense.

By the way, if I remember correctly something being metaphorical has a suffix or prefix or such in Loyban, so there would in effect be one word for literal medical blindness, and one for metaphorical blindness to waht is going on.

Yeah, but Lojban precludes idiomatic language (which, I'm pretty sure, is what it's for in the first place). Anyway, this is discussing a new languuge for the Internet. Would unambiguity be a good thing? What about jokes, poetry, and stories?

Vester has a point. How am I supposed to make all my incredibly lame puns if everything is unambiguous?

[bjlong]

The thing is, trade languages (which Lojban strives to be) always end up very irregular after some time, due to the wide variety of people trying to speak it for the first time. And, of course, language isn't prescriptive but descriptive, that is, language is how people talk, not how people say people should talk. The idea of being easy to learn doesn't help much--common Greek was supposedly easy to learn in the Roman times, until a few decades passed. This means that Lojban will get irregularities if it succeeds as an international language. So much for that.

Lojban will also get ambiguities, for much the same reason.

IMO, of course.

One thought is that human language allows for ambiguity because getting precision generally requires only one query and one answer, and the ambiguity means greater modularity and speed.

[G-Flex]

And even if lojban has some sort of affix you can attach to a word to indicate that you're using metaphor, eventually somebody would leave it out in order to induce more intentionally ambiguity, or for effect of some kind. Point is, people are going to do what they want with language.

A prescriptive, constructed language can work okay, but not for general-use, and even if it's only a "trade language", you're still going to have the problems bjlong mentioned.

[Ampersand]

There's also the problem of it being insanely difficult to learn. But like I said, Esperanto is a much more reasonable possibility. Anyone can learn it really. In fact it's so easy to learn, many people learn it just to learn how to learn a language. Why the love for Esperanto? Here's a conjugation of the verb Kanti, to sing.

Kantas <-Present Tense "is Singing"
Kantis  <-Past Tense "has Sang"
Kantos <-Future Tense "Will Sing"

Kanti    <-Infinitve "To Sing"
Kantu   <-Jussive "Sing!"(command)
Kantus  <-Conditional (hypothetical state of singing) Eg, "I would have (hypothetically) sang yesterday if you told me to"

Those verb endings will be the same for every single verb, no exceptions. It's not like French where there are more exceptions to the rules than verbs that fit the rules. Esperanto was designed for it's simplicity.

[Derakon]

Of course, the actual trade language of the world is English, which may not be particularly easy to learn or free of ambiguity, but does have the advantage of being in actual use by a large proportion of the industrialized world.

[G-Flex]

That's only for ultimately-transient economic reasons, though, not by virtue of the language itself.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

Of course, the actual trade language of the world is English, which may not be particularly easy to learn or free of ambiguity, but does have the advantage of being in actual use by a large proportion of the industrialized world.

My Grandfather always said it will be Chinese in the next couple decades or so...

[Ampersand]

Nonsense. As it stands China currently has a higher number of English speaking citizens than any other country in the world. Chinese, being what it is, is far too difficult for most non-native speakers to pick up, due to it's non-alphabetic nature, and complex pronunciations.

There are many languages that fall under Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese being the most well known. Both have sounds that don't have clean analogues in other languages, which makes the learning even more difficult. English speakers would probably be most familiar with the absence of the English L and Th sounds in Japanese and some other south east Asian languages.

By the time a human is about 3 or 4, the ability for the individual to acquire new language specific sounds is effectively stunted. New grammar rules, particularly if they are vastly different from the native language, are also exceptionally difficult to acquire without years of practice.

This is why I don't see any Chinese language being a trade language any time in the future. Probably the only thing English has going for it is that English is alphabetic while Chinese languages are syllabaries.

</language nerd>

[bjlong]

^^^ Care to point me to a reference for the child-figure? I was under the impression that it takes children 4 to 5 years to fully master a language they have full immersion in, versus adults who can master a language in 1 to 2 years with full immersion. I thought that extended to new grammar rules and new sounds, as well. In either case, learning a language is hard.

That said, yes, the volume of new things for non-Asian-language speakers to learn would make it difficult to adopt. However, English isn't exactly a walk in the park for those speaking Asian and Indian languages--we might see the rise of two trade languages in the near future.

[Ampersand]

My college psychology textbook.

While it takes a child four to five years to learn language, before they begin to learn any language, they babble, just make noises. For the first year, they are able to babble any sound that is offered to them, like a parrot almost. After a while, though, they loose this ability, and begin to babble only the sounds that are native to their language, and soon after that, they loose the ability to gain new babble sounds. As this happens, they begin acquiring words, and grammar, locking into the 'right' way to speak according to their environment