Metablog

Many say that Lojban is an unambiguous language. This is true in many respects, and is probably more true for Lojban than for practically any other language. Lojban has an unambiguous phonology (when pronounced clearly and without error) and an unambiguous grammar (again, when used correctly). In its primary word list (both for gismu and cmavo), it avoids polysemy, the assignment of multiple meanings to a word.

Now, this lack of ambiguity, as far as it goes, makes for extremely fascinating discussions about “little words”, like “the” and “so” and “a”, and about the various basic mechanisms of language. But what it does not do is substantially decrease the occurrence of ambiguity in language as it’s actually used.

Only a minority of the occurrences of ambiguity in normal English are of the sort not found in Lojban. Misinterpretations of spoken lanugage rarely happen. If a hearer has trouble, it’s usually the case that they can’t form any sensible interpretation, and when they do form an interpretation it’s very likely the right one. (Music lyrics are different, because so much information is lost due to the difficulty of clearly hearing the words, the often unnatural pronunciation, and the loss of most syllable stress.) Ambiguous grammar hardly ever causes any confusion in English.

Polysemy is a bit more complicated. First, it’s the case that a “meaning” of a word has a dimension. The meaning narrows down what’s being communicated to a certain range, and a particular instance can be anywhere in that range. A “table” can mean a dining room table or a coffee table or a cafe table or a workshop table, etc. That range of meaning is a big blob in meaning-space. But it’s not polysemy. Polysemy is when a word has two or more completely separate blobs of meaning, or when it has two or more basically separate blobs of meaning that have a little bit of overlap. Now, Lojban does a lovely job of having very precise meanings in its structure words, its “small” words (called “cmavo”). The meaning blobs are smaller than they are in English. Lojban’s “nouns” and “verbs” (called gismu), also successfully avoid having much polysemy. English has orders of magnitude more in its common words. On the other hand, gismu have very wide extents in their definitions—their meaning blobs are quite large. (This is because there aren’t many of these words. For instance, instead of “author”, lojban has a word that means “author/painter/composer/architect/inventor”. New words can be formed to narrow the meaning, but Lojban is so young that not many of these words have really been created and used yet.)

Polysemy rarely, rarely causes confusion in English, though it is the source of a lot of humor. For instance, if I say “table” and mean “dining table”, it’s going to be extremely rare that you’ll understand it as “actuarial table”. No, the majority of misunderstandings in English are due to confusion about which part of the meaning is intended. I say “table” and mean “dining table”; you hear “table” and understand “coffee table”. I don’t say “dining table” because I think our shared context would make it redundant to say “dining”. But the context as you understand it makes it so “coffee” is the more sensible interpretation.

This type of confusion is not avoided by Lojban, except in a few of the more mechanical type words. Because this is also the most common type of misunderstanding, by far, Lojban will not significantly reduce misunderstanding during communication.

There’s one more type of confusion that I want to address. I think this kind of confusion is the most common in deep discussions between ideologically similar people. Assertions often have subtle implications that depend greatly on an individual’s worldview. Whether one agrees with, or even sees, these different implications depends on one’s own worldview. Much mistunderstanding is simply seeing different implications of assertions. A person asserts X and sees implications Y and Z. Another person reads X and sees implications V and W. They disagree vehemently with X, because of V and W, though they agree with X itself, and probably even Y and Z. This is similar to the previous type of misunderstanding, except that most of the time the difference in the extent of meaning can’t be tied down to one word, or often, easily tied down at all.

Now, I don’t expect that the existence of these different types of misunderstandings is controversial. But I additionally assert that the more subtle misunderstandings constitute the vast majority of ambiguity as it actually contributes to misunderstanding. Thus, I think it’s not possible to say that Lojban is even remotely free of ambiguity (without tightly restricting what one means by “free of ambiguity”). And I will continue to be aggravated when people do so.

Many of the older texts mention that Lojban might be uniquely suitable for human-computer communication. The idea is that since computers are so bad at resolving the meaning of polysemous words, and at resolving ambiguity in grammar, (two things that humans are extremely good at,) that the absence of these things will make it much easier to allow computers to understand human speech. But the fact is that computers that don’t have a flexible enough language model to resolve ambiguities from polysemy and grammar ambiguity are unlikely to be nearly subtle enough to correctly resolve ambiguities in extent. So creating a language like Lojban for that purpose (which was never the, or even a, primary purpose for the language, as I understand) is analogous to taking a course in mechanical engineering and building a shovel cleaner before starting the work on digging a tunnel to China. Any application in which some restricted subset of English could be used, except for problems with polysemy and grammar ambiguity, is an application that probably doesn’t need to use a natural language at all.

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