Lojban

[tene]

I had a lot of fun in the lojban community back around 2003 - 2010. I attended a few jbonunsla, and that community is where I made the professional connections that lead to me moving to the Bay Area.

During a recent conversation, I realized that a lot of the community dysfunction there is the typical contrarian trap: If you're doing something sufficiently unusual, the vast majority of the people who show up to work on it with you are going to be extremely opinionated contrarians more-interested in personal experimentation than in working to make something solid and accessible to a general audience, and not particularly interested in cooperating or otherwise working together. Most of the people who are interested in pragmatic applications are going to just use something already widely used. The lojban community, when I was active in it, had a huge variety of interesting ideas that nobody was ever following up on or implementing, and the big projects people agreed were important (completing a document standardizing a new version of the language) languished. There were pretty regularly complaints about the community infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing list) that were answered with "If you're passionate about this, please feel free to fix it, or take over running it yourself. I want to hand these off and stop being the only responsible person. I'll give you commit access, root access on the servers, etc." that were almost never actually accepted.

So, basically like almost every open-source project out there. ;)

[sli]

When I was playing with Toki Pona, a surprising amount of people were incredibly resistant to it, sometimes to the point of being upset about it, for... some reason I could never figure out. Never got a straight answer. I found the whole thing really, really bizarre.

Before anyone asks, it wasn't because I was speaking Toki Pona to them. I only speak it to friends that also know it, it's just that sometimes there are other people around.

[peatmoss]

I love utopian language communities. I finished out the Duolingo Esperanto course. And of course, a Lojbanist would tell you that Esperanto is too Euro-centric to be truly international, and not nearly as linguistically precise as Lojban.

In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.

[gkya]

Esperanto is really better-is-better: most of the world today either knows some English or speaks a romance language. Also, the language has a very natural structure to it, an a lexicon that seemingly (I'm not a speaker, but I have some familiarity) could've formed under a rather natural process of elite dominance---the hyphothesised means to Latinification of northern Mediterranean, and Turkification of the region that constitutes modern Turkey and thereabouts, for example; see "Before Babel", Renfrew, 1991---in central or eastern Europe. Thus, knowledge of many prominent world languages is transferible to Esperanto, and the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages. That is very valuable.

WRT English, there's nothing inherent to it that makes it the lingua franca of the world, it's just that it's the language of the dominating socio-economic powers since the British Empire. How quickly Mandarin is becoming popular around the world is a modern evidence to how economics play a role in determining the cultural appreciation of a particular country.

[fsiefken]

Yes, was just explaining this to a colleague this morning. I tried to learn some Lojban.. was a good experience. I like that sentences start with a dot and capitals are thrown out. I even registered a lojban word domain name. Some noteworthy bits: * Vitalik Buterin reads/writes Lojban long before he started Ethereum https://bitcointalk.to/index.php?topic=21007.msg%msg_id% * Ben Goertzel of AGI fame dabbled in Lojban but decided on an English hybrid to skip learning the vocabulary but keeping the grammar http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm

I've some good Esperanto books I chew on and lately I've been looking into Elefen and Ikthuil.

https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4...

[foobiekr]

I took classes from lojbab when I was 16 or so waaay back in the 90s in Vienna. It seemed like a cool techie thing to do for a college freshman.

Now and then I look into it, where it is, etc. One thing I could not get past was that the language is ugly. It’s very hard on the ears - I say this speaking English, Japanese, and some Spanish and have taken a few years of Mandarin, so perhaps it’s a taste thing, but I’ve heard lots of people say this over the years and I agree with it.

[EtDybNuvCu]

It only takes a day to learn the basics: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Anyone with an interest in the story of Lojban and a dozen other fascinating conlangs (constructed languages) should read "In the Land of Invented Languages". It's a terrific collection of tales of bizarre ego, hubris, and profound misunderstandings of how human ("natural") languages actually function in reality.

[mrguyorama]

I love Lojban from the point of view of "eliminate ambiguity as a language feature", but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd. It also makes reading somewhat more difficult from anyone who uses a Latin character set and english-alike sentence structures (IMO, a single 100 level linguistics course does not make me an expert)

[Hussell]

Eliminating syntactic (not semantic) ambiguity is indeed a noble goal, but I was kind of horrified when I first realized how it's done in Lojban. Practically every type of phrase has both its start and its end marked by a unique word or class of words, with the terminator usually optional in any context where dropping it would not result in any ambiguity. Knowing exactly when dropping a terminator would result in ambiguity is pretty difficult, and in practice is rare enough that seeing a terminator is something of a surprise and usually requires a trip to look it up in the dictionary.

It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).

[schoen]

> but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd

The ʻokina is sort of a precedent for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop

although then people can have humongous arguments over whether it's correct to write it with ʻ, `, ', or other alternatives.

[TUSF]

The letter thing is kinda understandable. They should have just used "h" instead of ' (even though that sound can technically be pronounced a number of ways, including as a dental fricative), but for the glottal stop "." which comes at the start and end of names and before particles that start with a vowel, I'm not sure anything else would work, while still being easy to type on a computer. The only other option that comes to mind is using one of the unused letters, but that might be even weirder, considering the latin alphabet doesn't have a letter for the glottal stop.

[gleki]

coi le munje .i coi se terdi

[tene]

coi gleki .i do mo .i mi pu zi co'a se jibri lo cnino