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Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication (mw.lojban.org)
11 points by brimnes 1619 days ago
3 comments

I learned a bit of this way back in college! The grammar itself is unambiguous (e.g. indefinite articles are implemented as Skolem constants, the whole thing is LR-parseable) but the semantics are not. There's a category of six-letter words (e.g. jbopre = lojbo + prenu = lojban learner) where the semantics of combining them isn't (probably can't) be defined. Remarkably, how the words themselves combine isn't even fully defined!

I wonder if any neural net-based translation services learn to translate to an intermediate language (Source->IL->Target), and if so, if analyzing the IL would have fairly unambiguous semantics to resist differences in semantics across languages.

Lojban has long been on my list of things to learn, ever since I read about its spiritual predecessor Loglan in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. There's a small collection of Lojban-related software at https://www.lojban.org/static/resources/tools.html.jbo, and I'd like to get into it.
https://lojban.io/ looks pretty good
Obligatory link to /r/lojban [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/lojban/