Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

An interesting problem is that constructed languages that avoid syntactic ambiguity by having a formal grammar with no unambiguous parsing (like Lojban and, I think, Ithkuil) can still have semantic ambiguity. In Lojban there is never a syntactic ambiguity about what the asserted relationship between concepts is, but the language community readily admits that the underlying concepts themselves still contain cultural and other ambiguities, in terms of whether given language users would agree to apply those concepts to particular things, situations, or people.

It's very possible that conlangs like Lojban and Ithkuil still contain concepts about storms that don't require a speaker to indicate what kind of precipitation the storm produced.

I'm by no means a Lojban expert, but some fiddling with http://jbovlaste.lojban.org leads me to "vilti'a" for "storm", a combination of "tcima" (x1 is weather/a meteorological phenomenon [at place x2]) and "vlile" (x1 is violent/in a state of violence). You can then further refine this, e.g. by adding "lindi" (x1 is a lightning/electical arc) to get "lidvilti'a" for a thunderstorm [at place x2].

Lojban focuses on relations, in the logical sense, between objects. Some relations are very concrete and familiar to English speakers and some are not. Here are some examples of Lojban relations:

mlatu = x1 (entity) is a cat of species x2 (taxon) As a noun: lo mlatu — cat.

carvi = x1 (entity) rains or showers to x2 (entity) from x3 (entity) As a noun: lo carvi — rain. lo te carvi — rain cloud.

simxu = x1 (entity group) mutually do x2 (relation between members of x1, contains two places for [ce'u]) As a noun: lo se simxu — done mutually.

cnemu = x1 (entity) rewards x2 (entity) for atypical x3 (property of x2) with x4 (entity, property of x1) As a noun: lo cnemu — rewarder. lo se cnemu — rewardee. lo te cnemu — reason for a reward. lo ve cnemu — reward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com