Talk:Ambiguity

Old discussion deleted.

Suggest 2 possible wiki links for Ambiguity.

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Can link Spoken language: ...at he was sitting on the [[couch]] when he ate the cookies. Spoken language can also contain lexical ambiguities, where there is more t...
Can link economic growth: ... will think he opposes taxes in general because they hinder economic growth; others will think he opposes only those taxes that he beli...

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Feedback: I like it, I hate it, Please don't link to — LinkBot 11:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Lojban/ Loglan reference

I added this passage, which I shifted in slightly edited form from the Imprecise language page to here, since these languages do not seek to avoid Vagueness; they merely avoid ambiguity. (At the imprecise language page, the suggestion was that they avoid vagueness.) For example, Loglan users presumably do not have in mind, when they apply their predicate "X is tall" to "John" (asserting of John that he is tall), that there is a certain exact number of inches which John's height is thereby said to exceed. So their word for "tall" is still vague, and hence imprecise, in this respect. Matt9090

Rationale for removal

Dreftymac added this in an HTML comment in the article, and I figured it'd be better here (I changed a little formatting):

The following was removed;;

Their unambiguity makes them better suited than natural languages for use in communication between humans and computers.

Highly debatable: 1) conclusion that conlang better suited than "natural languages" for this purpose; 2) whether there *is* such a thing as "communication between humans and computers" (as opposed to communication between humans who use computers and humans who program them); 3)whether the increased precision of conlangs is empirically superior by themselves (rather than superior because the people who use them just tend to be more precise than average anyway). 4) sounds a bit too much POV.

--Galaxiaad 17:16, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Uncyclopedia entry on Ambiguity may be better than this entry, however some people might choose to argue that. Sweetandy 08:47, 25 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions

In linguistics there are some famous examples like "The horse raced past the barn fell" and in speech segmentation "How to wreck a nice beach you sing calm incense". it might be nice to note these examples with the appropriate references. Josh Froelich 15:28, 29 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, idiomatic or anaphoric ambiguity. I can't think of the right example, but something like "Dick, Bob and Jane went to the mall, but he left without her" where the pronoun "he" is ambiguous in whether it is Dick or Bob.Josh Froelich 15:30, 29 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More suggestions

Ambiguity in Mathematics is absent.. We need examples and reterences. dima 02:34, 2 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Concur with the above. I've never heard of ambiguity in Math, either.--Orthologist 18:11, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]