It's funny how Turkish already is kind of close to a conlang like Lojban

How so?

This might be referring to the regular grammar of Turkish.

In Turkish, if you have a plural noun in the ablative case (roughly meaning 'out from'), you show this by attaching the plural suffix and the ablative suffix to the noun. For example, 'ev' means 'house', '-ler' is the plural suffix, and '-den' is the ablative suffix, so 'evlerden' means 'from (the) houses'.

In Latin (and most Indo-European languages that preserve case), on the other hand, you have one marker for 'ablative plural', that's completely distinct from (most) other case-forms of the plural, and from the ablative singular. So 'domus' means 'house' (in the nominative singular -- there are no zero-marked nouns in Latin, which means that every noun has an explicit case+number marker), 'domibus' means 'from (the) houses', and 'domū' means 'from the/a house'.

This also applies to verbs. In Latin, you have one single marker on the verb that signifies tense, aspect, mood, and person. Passive verbs conjugate completely differently from active verbs, for example. In Turkish, you generally have one marker per thing signified.

(English has lost most of this inflection, but we still have -s for third-person singular present active.)

There's also a lot more irregularity in Turkish than in Latin. Latin has five declensions for nouns and four conjugations for verbs -- so 'domus' takes a completely different set of case markers from 'Rōma'. In fact, 'domus' doesn't really fit into the declension system at all -- it's entirely irregular. (Think English strong verbs.)

The thing about this is that it's actually Latin that's crosslinguistically weird here, rather than Turkish. Most languages are more like either Turkish (lots of affixes, each of which with one and only one meaning) or Chinese (not many affixes at all) than Latin (affixes which mean several different things at once). Most Indo-European languages are to some extent like Latin, but most non-Indo-European languages aren't very much like Latin.

Turkish also doesn't have grammatical gender, or any sort of noun class system at all. (Grammatical gender is one type of noun class system, common in the Indo-European languages.) But noun class systems aren't cross-linguistically uncommon.

Unless I’m missing something, that’s not per se what loglan/lojban sets out to achieve. Does Turkish have precise, unambiguous syntax and morphology? Meaning there is never (other than context dependent semantics) any way for one sentence to be parsed two different ways?

Of course Turkish has its ambiguities and was not designed with the same ideas in mind as Lojban.

But it is in many ways more precise syntactically than other languages and almost completely regular. This is also due to some "cleansing" of the language from Persian and Arabic influences in the early 20th century.

Imho with languages the elephant in the room is context. I don't see how the additional rigour in syntax compared to Turkish would be scoring points for lojban, when the contextual problems that both languages face are not solved.

That was my point above about semantics :)

Semantics are hard. There's a long-running slow-burning debate in the Lojban community about the degree to which BPFK, a guiding body for Lojban, is expected to formalize the semantics and philosophy of the language.

That said, this sounds like a shitpost. Syntax and morphology aren't solved problems for natlangs, and while Lojban's parsing might be messy, it is nonetheless far less ambiguous than English.

Maybe a few Lojban words will enlighten you as to the power of the language?

{ga'i} a marker for formal rank and formal register/diction

{ko'a} a variable

{goi} reassign names and variables

{ce'u} a marker for holes under {ka} abstractions

{ka} definitely not lambda! An abstractor for relations

{ti'e} "I hear that..." a marker for unverifiable hearsay

{da'i} "supposing..." a marker for counterfactuals

Finally, here's something that SSC doesn't have (yet?), a tutorial: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda

I'm quite familiar with lojban, thank you. And you must have a high bar for content if a critique is considered a "shitpost."

Syntax and morphology are largely solved problems at the frontier of NLP. If you think that this is not the case, then I must ask by what metric do you make that judgement? We have machines that are able to transcribe human speech and infer intent with lower error rates than humans for the same task. QED.

Formal semantics was hard at the time that loglans were codified. It was hard until very recently in fact. But that is no longer the case: Davidsonian event semantics is now expressive enough to give exact, unambiguous semantics for every desired utterance. There are still many unsolved problems in the field of semantics, but they are problems of the sort "what's the best way to represent..." not "how do we reconcile the two main theories giving totally opposite results."

For an overview of the modern state of formal semantics I suggest this work, which successfully dissolved the last lingering major conflicts in the field:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10988-014-9162-...

> {ti'e} "I hear that..." a marker for unverifiable hearsay > {da'i} "supposing..." a marker for counterfactuals

Isn't there a language spoken in Africa with a similar concept? I remember vaguely that there was a minor scandal some years ago because a politician said something like "Unfortunately, we couldn't finish the project in time" and the translator used the wrong form, so it sounded like they never intended to do so.

Bulgarian has a verb form for the former.

The latter is commonly encompassed by the subjunctive mood in Romance languages, although that also covers other meanings, depending on the specific language.