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nomeltoday at 4:25 AM4 repliesview on HN

Let's use a non-ambiguous language for this. May I suggest Lojban [1][2]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

[2] Someone speaking it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxQjwbUiM9w


Replies

dwbtoday at 12:04 PM

Lojban allows you to be vastly more semantically ambiguous than English while still speaking technically correctly. A single predicate-word (“gismu”) is a valid utterance. For example, saying “tanxe” is so vague or context-dependent enough as to be hard to translate: “something unspecified is a box, at an unspecified time or place, and it may or may not even exist”. Language will not save you. Or if it will, we already have them in the form of programming languages.

mike_hearntoday at 9:19 AM

Lojban allows you to speak ambiguously, it just disallows grammatical ambiguity because in the 70s it was hypothesized that NLP understanding was impossible so humans would have to adapt instead of computers. That debate is over; understanding grammar is solved. The new debate is over semantic ambiguity.

doogliustoday at 5:13 AM

It looks like that's about syntactic ambiguity, whereas the parent is talking semantic ambiguity