Unambiguous grammar? Lojban is supposed to have it.
The goal is good, but the implementation is not.
From what I learned briefly, in Lojbal you need to memorize a list of parameters that go with each verb. Parameters are things like “walking home”, “walking from school”, “walking at 3 PM”. Then you need to place the parameters in the right order. Any of those parameters can be a word that itself has parameters, but you know how many, so the parsing is unambiguous (it’s a prefix syntax).
Example (fictional, but realistic), the word “walking” has 5 parameters, first is “from where”, second is “through where”, third is “to where”, fourth is “when”, and fifth is “with whom”; so the proper way to say “walking home from school at 3 PM” would be: “walking school unspecified home 3 unspecified”.
My objection is that the choice of parameters is quite arbitrary. (Why is there “when” and “with whom”, but not “in what mood” or “in what weather” or “how fast”?) And you need a way to express “in what mood” or “how fast” anyway, so now you have two different methods to express parameters. Why not have one method only, so that you do not need to memorize the order and meaning of parameters for each verb separately. And now I’m kinda reinventing prepositions...
I think it is worth designing how to make prepositions (or their equivalent) parse unambiguously in complex sentences. But the idea that there is a fixed set of prepositions for each verb seems completely unrealistic.
I looked up the real example: cadzu means “x1 walks on surface x2 using limbs x3”. I think I see your point. Lambda calculus (and close derivatives, like Haskell) seem to do fine with only unary functions. To be fair, the definition of any word is kind of arbitrary, but it seems more elegant to build these up from smaller pieces.
After studying Iverson’s J (itself an APL derivative), I think one could make a good case for arity-2 verbs taking only a subject and object, with adverbs remaining unary. From briefly skimming parts of a Lojban crash course just now, it appears that the places are usually more regular than you give them credit for. They tend to go in the order subject, object, destination, origin, means, although not all verbs have all of these, which does seem confusing.
I also stumbled across Ithkuil, another conlang which seems to have that terseness quality I was looking for, as well as claiming to be a logical language. But it’s so difficult that nobody speaks it fluently.
The goal is good, but the implementation is not.
From what I learned briefly, in Lojbal you need to memorize a list of parameters that go with each verb. Parameters are things like “walking home”, “walking from school”, “walking at 3 PM”. Then you need to place the parameters in the right order. Any of those parameters can be a word that itself has parameters, but you know how many, so the parsing is unambiguous (it’s a prefix syntax).
Example (fictional, but realistic), the word “walking” has 5 parameters, first is “from where”, second is “through where”, third is “to where”, fourth is “when”, and fifth is “with whom”; so the proper way to say “walking home from school at 3 PM” would be: “walking school unspecified home 3 unspecified”.
My objection is that the choice of parameters is quite arbitrary. (Why is there “when” and “with whom”, but not “in what mood” or “in what weather” or “how fast”?) And you need a way to express “in what mood” or “how fast” anyway, so now you have two different methods to express parameters. Why not have one method only, so that you do not need to memorize the order and meaning of parameters for each verb separately. And now I’m kinda reinventing prepositions...
I think it is worth designing how to make prepositions (or their equivalent) parse unambiguously in complex sentences. But the idea that there is a fixed set of prepositions for each verb seems completely unrealistic.
I looked up the real example: cadzu means “x1 walks on surface x2 using limbs x3”. I think I see your point. Lambda calculus (and close derivatives, like Haskell) seem to do fine with only unary functions. To be fair, the definition of any word is kind of arbitrary, but it seems more elegant to build these up from smaller pieces.
After studying Iverson’s J (itself an APL derivative), I think one could make a good case for arity-2 verbs taking only a subject and object, with adverbs remaining unary. From briefly skimming parts of a Lojban crash course just now, it appears that the places are usually more regular than you give them credit for. They tend to go in the order subject, object, destination, origin, means, although not all verbs have all of these, which does seem confusing.
I also stumbled across Ithkuil, another conlang which seems to have that terseness quality I was looking for, as well as claiming to be a logical language. But it’s so difficult that nobody speaks it fluently.