alt Hacker NewsI think it was the Uplift series by David Brin that has an idea where the old galactic races all speak a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes. What a great world to strive for. No I'll take the mess please FFS.
People joke about engineer types treating humans the same as machines, but really I see no excuse for even engineer types to get this wrong. It's a failure to recognize what the function or goal actually is, and then optimizing for the wrong thing.
Replies
> I think it was the Uplift series by David Brin that has an idea where the old galactic races all speak a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes.
Where can I sign up?
Talking to developers about humanities often highlights how smart we're not.
> a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes.
Lojban, the constructed language, features:
a) logical grammar, inspired by predicate logic which means every sentence in Lojban has an unambiguous structure that a computer can parse
b) no ambiguity in the grammar (structural ambiguity) while you can be as vague or detailed as you like (or as funny!!)
c) emotional expressions via an "attitudinal" system of words that function like emoji
https://mw.lojban.org/index.php
and here are some Lojban literary forms writeup: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms