Boy, I have fond memories of participating in the Lojban Yahoo group back in 2003 when I was 16. I carried around the Cowan book to my classes and loved reading random sections. I was in awe of how elegantly it was designed, and it inspired me to invent my own languages.
My only complaint about the language was about the reliance on word order instead of prepositions to determine the relationship between nouns. It made the language harder to learn since you have to memorize the parameters for each word, and it always felt arbitrary (what if there is no parameter for the meaning I wish to convey?).
You could always prefix the arguments with their place markers. Then choose to move them around, or leave them in their default positions. Most selbri (predicates) never had many sumti (arguments), and the default first or second were designed (rightly or wrongly) to be the most common. Very like arguments to a function, and then having the option of having named argument.
And if there was no parameter you could add it. There were mechanisms for creating new places with appropriate markers. Sounds like you never got to that part of the language - it was definitely in the more advanced usage, but actually when you came across it in practice your brain tended to do the right thing with it. In that sense the system worked as intended.
It was fun to learn, and it gave me some ideas that got me going in natural language processing despite that it's not a natural language.
The argument structures were one of the big problems I had with it, too: it seemed like someone coming up with predicates just kept tacking on more arguments that were not at all essential to the predicate, in case someone wanted them. This lacks elegance.
Also, the grammar needs an overhaul. There are hundreds of PEG nodes, some of them are almost the same as others except that things you'd want to say are unexpectedly ungrammatical, and some of them could never be used at all except in an interplanetary spelling bee.
I emphasize that this did not stop me from enjoying it, and much later writing an MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle in it [1]. (warning: Mystery Hunt puzzles are hard)
With my programmer hat on, using word order to distinguish the parameters to a selbri feels very Haskell. However, using prepositions feels very Python (i.e. keyword parameters).
I do agree with you about using keyword parameters. The Lojban way to do it would be to add single-syllable cmavo for each position, so that you'd tag parameters depending on what position you wanted them to fill. But this would involve adding at least one syllable to every phrase which involved a selbri, and probably more. It'd be interesting to calculate what that would do to the overall bandwidth.
I remember learning quite a bit of Lojban back in 1989 using a flashcard program on my PC. I even subscribed to Bob LeChevalier's newsletter for a while. I drifted away from it probably because it wasn't solving a problem that I had, cool as it was in theory. It was probably more interesting to construct the language than to use it.
I always wondered. Why do people learn languages like Lojban or Esperanto when you can learn some actual languages that actual people use? Why not learn Spanish, or Hindi, or Mandarin, or Arabic, or Russian... and learn a language nobody really speaks?
I don't mean it in a derogatory sense, I am merely personally interested; if I had the time and capacity to learn a new language, I would gather it's both more useful and more fun to learn an actual living language, with a rich culture and history.
True or not, here's a very practical line of reasoning:
* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in one's first acquired natural language takes about four years.
* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in each subsequent acquired natural language takes about two years.[0]
* Learning a clean "constructed" language is reasonably efficient. Fluency in Esperanto or Lojban, for example, can be attained in as little as one year.
* Thus to learn, say, Swedish, it's fastest to learn Lojban first in one year, and then Swedish is a subsequent acquired language and only takes an additional two years.
* Conclusion: It's faster to learn "(Esperanto|Lojban) Swedish" than it is to learn Swedish alone.
I don't entirely subscribe to this theory, but it's an interesting speculation.
For me, I learned some constructed languages because I wondered if they would provoke the Sapir-Whorf effect. Anecdata: They did.
[0] The rationale is that the first requires un-learning things you've always taken for granted with regards your cradle language. Learning subsequent languages doesn't require that "un-learning, and so is quicker."
I have interest in these languages because, in general, I have high appreciation for simple solutions to complex problems. I find very interesting how they solve different challenges.
I just learn a bit about them, but do not learn to speak, at least not enough to have the simplest conversation. But I understand how you could get more hooked into it and learn it and spend many hours with your toy language.
From all the unuseful hobbies people have, I do not think learning artificial languages is one of the worse.
I study Spanish because i live in the USA and Spanish is the de facto second language (almost all of the time). But Spanish wasn't useful in Turkey, Japan, Cairo, etc. where i did use Esperanto. I wish i could learn all the languages of the world, but i'm just not that good at it. Esperanto is easy.
But, more than that... In the USA a native Spanish speaker is (too) often discriminated against. As a non-native Spanish speaker i am always on the outside of conversations in Spanish. Esperanto is meant to be everybody's second(!) language, not be a homogenizing language for the planet. Esperanto speakers are all non-natives (actually there are some natives, but they don't have special powers :) so we Esperantists meet as equals.
To riff on what somebody else wrote, if a client said i had to learn Haskell, i'd be happy to be paid to do so. My "payment" for knowing Esperanto is the community of (mostly) intelligent, (mostly) compassionate, and (mostly) generous people i've met using it.
People learn Esperanto because it's useful - especially if you travel or have international interests. I have used Esperanto in Argentina, Cameroon and about fifteen European countries. We are seeing an upsurge in Esperanto at the moment because of the appearance of the Duolingo course. See:
Duolinghttp://www.liberafolio.org/9-000-homoj-eklernis-esperanton-e...
Two days after the launch of Esperanto course at the popular language learning site Duolingo, the course has already gained almost ten thousand participants. The course still is not even officially launched, but is in its test phase. The course opened in its testing phase on Thursday 28 May at eight o'clock in the evening (M.E.T.) In less than two days, the course already had 9,600 registered participants, although it has not yet been actively advertised.
My mum learned Esperanto - main motivation a kind of idealism where the world can come together with a common language without any particular culture dominating the others in the way you would tend to get if you chose say English as the common language. It also can be a social thing to meet others with a similar worldview.
The problem with inventing languages is that we don't fully understand natural languages. For example, there is no satisfactory formal semantics for natural languages. Categorical grammar and Montague grammar are some inroads into formal semantics, but they don't get very far. The work of Roger Schank got further in terms of expressiveness, but then fizzled out, probably because it was ad hoc and lacked an underlying mathematical structure. So inventing a language is working in the dark.
There are some natural languages which were in part designed in a top down manner, like Mandarin and Indonesian. But still, on the scale of natural to artificial, these are much closer to natural languages. They were both based on some other natural language(s), borrowing words and grammar from them.
So inventing languages is a good thing, as a research topic into how natural languages work (with plenty of provisos, of course).
And, as a human nature hack, marketing them as tools for world-peace, etc. makes them much more likely to be adopted by idealistic humans who may have the motivation to actually test them for a few decades...
Learning a conlang seems like fun. But should I start with Lojban or Esperanto?
My impression is that Lojban is meant to be as logically unambiguous (in terms of grammar) as possible, while Esperanto seeks to be more of an international/universal language. I think Esperanto is more widely spoken?
Both are apparently somewhat easier to learn than other languages.
Probably depends on your goals. Since you already know the most popular language in the world, it doesn't seem like there's much point in learning either of them just to extend the number of people you can communicate with. For that reason it would make sense to learn Chinese or Spanish.
To me the appeal of Lojban is in "expanding your mind" and using different tools for thinking.
Also, I've recently read somewhere people recommending to learn a sign language, so that is a thing you might want to consider. They say that it is easy to learn and is very different from English(hence - interesting).
Not knowing either of them. However I find myself interest as well and read around a little. My conclusion:
Consider yourself a Java/C++/Javascript programmer. Now Lojban is like Haskell. Very different and it will probably expand your mind. Esperanto is like Ruby or Go. Not that different but a lot of fun.
Lojban is logical but very difficult; it is so logical that the mental discipline required to use it correctly far exceeds that of natural languages. (Which may be an insight into why natural languages are not logical). Quoting Akira Okrent:
> To all the language curmudgeons out there who insist that people ought to speak more logically, I say, be careful what you wish for. You go on about the "logical" mismatch between "everyone" and "their" in perfectly normal sounding sentences like "Everyone clapped their hands." You argue that phrases like "very unique" and "sufficiently enough" don't make logical sense. You harp on "hopefully" and "literally" and "the reason is because," all the while calling logic to your side to defend your righteous anger. Before you judge me as some kind of "anything goes" language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.
> And oh, how grateful I am. Do you know how good we have it, how much easier our speaking lives are made by the fact that language and logic part ways? Consider the word "and." Why, you barely have to know what you mean when you say it! When you say you “like ham and eggs” do you have to specify whether you like each of those things as evaluated on its own merits separately or whether you like them served together as an entrée? No. You just lazily throw out your "and" and let context do the rest of the work for you. When you say you “woke up and ate breakfast” do you mean that you woke up first and then ate breakfast? Or did you do the two things simultaneously? Or, maybe your breakfast was asleep, so you woke it up and then ate it. Pshaw, you say. You know what I mean. Perhaps I do, says the Lojbanist. Perhaps I don’t.
Taking on the project of learning a logical language like Lojban may not end in your being able to speak the language well, but who cares--you will learn a lot about linguistics and you will focus on potential ambiguity in how you use English or other languages.
By comparison, Esperanto's grammar is very easy--sixteen rules, easily learned by anyone familiar with a European language. It's wonderful to have a learning curve that is so short.
Just get started. It doesn't matter. Whichever will be more reasonable will be what you end up with. And if you spend energy learning 50% of the other one first, then it's not really a loss. Every little step you learn of a language also improves your global understanding and therefore wasn't wasted.
My impression is that Lojban is more of a research language than something people actually speak, but I'd be delighted to be wrong. It's beautifully elegant.
One more point that wasn't mentioned before. While both conlangs might be interesting, some people might argue that Esperanto is more valuable because there actual native speakers. It's true that one guy created that language just by himself, but nowadays there are people who learn and speak that language when they grow up.
That doesn't change my opinion though, that it doesn't matter much with which you start.
I've always wondered about the way predicate words are chosen in Loglan and Lojban, i.e. maximizing a weighted sum of phonemes common to the candidate word and the words in widely spoken natural languages. The only English speakers who would recognize "blanu" as corresponding to "blue" are those who know something about those conlangs, and I bet the same could be said for Chinese speakers and "lan". Esperanto is criticized by some as Eurocentric, but at least some people will recognize the vocabulary.
As an English speaker who once spoke a little Loglan (the 1978 dialect!), I think you're mistaken. Knowing "blue" definitely helps in remembering "blanu". Occasionally there was a word that didn't take a lot of its phonemes from English, and those were definitely harder to learn.
Obviously the benefit is going to be smaller if you don't speak one of the major source languages, but it still seems like a reasonable strategy to me for selecting vocabulary in an artificial language.
It feels like natural languages would evolve shortcuts based on the cultural context in which they arise.
I would think that a language based on predicate logic would be less efficient at communicating oft-expressed things, like a Huffman code dictionary where all the entries are weighted equally.
If you can absorb what's in this video, you could probably pick up lojban with little effort on the grammar side. Alas, vocabulary is just something you have to get through.
Ugh. How awful. Apostrophes and (full stop) dots repurposed as letters within words. But at least there aren't any accented characters or other diacritics.
Phonemes aside, why would anyone design that, and imagine it as a feature and not a bug?
dots represent pauses or glottal stops. what other symbol could be used for it? Apostrophe represent either [h] or "th" like in "thin". Again what other letter could be used?
IIRC, one of the ideas of lojban was to develop a group of speakers of the languge during a frozen baseline period where the language couldn't change. Then changes could be made by the speakers of the language in lojban itself and see how it evolved.
[+] [-] gw|10 years ago|reply
My only complaint about the language was about the reliance on word order instead of prepositions to determine the relationship between nouns. It made the language harder to learn since you have to memorize the parameters for each word, and it always felt arbitrary (what if there is no parameter for the meaning I wish to convey?).
[+] [-] ColinWright|10 years ago|reply
And if there was no parameter you could add it. There were mechanisms for creating new places with appropriate markers. Sounds like you never got to that part of the language - it was definitely in the more advanced usage, but actually when you came across it in practice your brain tended to do the right thing with it. In that sense the system worked as intended.
[+] [-] rspeer|10 years ago|reply
It was fun to learn, and it gave me some ideas that got me going in natural language processing despite that it's not a natural language.
The argument structures were one of the big problems I had with it, too: it seemed like someone coming up with predicates just kept tacking on more arguments that were not at all essential to the predicate, in case someone wanted them. This lacks elegance.
Also, the grammar needs an overhaul. There are hundreds of PEG nodes, some of them are almost the same as others except that things you'd want to say are unexpectedly ungrammatical, and some of them could never be used at all except in an interplanetary spelling bee.
I emphasize that this did not stop me from enjoying it, and much later writing an MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle in it [1]. (warning: Mystery Hunt puzzles are hard)
[1] http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2013/coinheist.com/rubik/lojicomi...
[+] [-] david-given|10 years ago|reply
With my programmer hat on, using word order to distinguish the parameters to a selbri feels very Haskell. However, using prepositions feels very Python (i.e. keyword parameters).
I do agree with you about using keyword parameters. The Lojban way to do it would be to add single-syllable cmavo for each position, so that you'd tag parameters depending on what position you wanted them to fill. But this would involve adding at least one syllable to every phrase which involved a selbri, and probably more. It'd be interesting to calculate what that would do to the overall bandwidth.
[+] [-] lkesteloot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runn1ng|10 years ago|reply
I don't mean it in a derogatory sense, I am merely personally interested; if I had the time and capacity to learn a new language, I would gather it's both more useful and more fun to learn an actual living language, with a rich culture and history.
[+] [-] ColinWright|10 years ago|reply
* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in one's first acquired natural language takes about four years.
* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in each subsequent acquired natural language takes about two years.[0]
* Learning a clean "constructed" language is reasonably efficient. Fluency in Esperanto or Lojban, for example, can be attained in as little as one year.
* Thus to learn, say, Swedish, it's fastest to learn Lojban first in one year, and then Swedish is a subsequent acquired language and only takes an additional two years.
* Conclusion: It's faster to learn "(Esperanto|Lojban) Swedish" than it is to learn Swedish alone.
I don't entirely subscribe to this theory, but it's an interesting speculation.
For me, I learned some constructed languages because I wondered if they would provoke the Sapir-Whorf effect. Anecdata: They did.
[0] The rationale is that the first requires un-learning things you've always taken for granted with regards your cradle language. Learning subsequent languages doesn't require that "un-learning, and so is quicker."
[+] [-] yiyus|10 years ago|reply
I just learn a bit about them, but do not learn to speak, at least not enough to have the simplest conversation. But I understand how you could get more hooked into it and learn it and spend many hours with your toy language.
From all the unuseful hobbies people have, I do not think learning artificial languages is one of the worse.
[+] [-] trio|10 years ago|reply
I study Spanish because i live in the USA and Spanish is the de facto second language (almost all of the time). But Spanish wasn't useful in Turkey, Japan, Cairo, etc. where i did use Esperanto. I wish i could learn all the languages of the world, but i'm just not that good at it. Esperanto is easy.
But, more than that... In the USA a native Spanish speaker is (too) often discriminated against. As a non-native Spanish speaker i am always on the outside of conversations in Spanish. Esperanto is meant to be everybody's second(!) language, not be a homogenizing language for the planet. Esperanto speakers are all non-natives (actually there are some natives, but they don't have special powers :) so we Esperantists meet as equals.
To riff on what somebody else wrote, if a client said i had to learn Haskell, i'd be happy to be paid to do so. My "payment" for knowing Esperanto is the community of (mostly) intelligent, (mostly) compassionate, and (mostly) generous people i've met using it.
YMMV
trio
[+] [-] BillChapman|10 years ago|reply
Two days after the launch of Esperanto course at the popular language learning site Duolingo, the course has already gained almost ten thousand participants. The course still is not even officially launched, but is in its test phase. The course opened in its testing phase on Thursday 28 May at eight o'clock in the evening (M.E.T.) In less than two days, the course already had 9,600 registered participants, although it has not yet been actively advertised.
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleki|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JesperRavn|10 years ago|reply
There are some natural languages which were in part designed in a top down manner, like Mandarin and Indonesian. But still, on the scale of natural to artificial, these are much closer to natural languages. They were both based on some other natural language(s), borrowing words and grammar from them.
[+] [-] deckiedan|10 years ago|reply
And, as a human nature hack, marketing them as tools for world-peace, etc. makes them much more likely to be adopted by idealistic humans who may have the motivation to actually test them for a few decades...
[+] [-] sneak|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stesch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleki|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eemax|10 years ago|reply
My impression is that Lojban is meant to be as logically unambiguous (in terms of grammar) as possible, while Esperanto seeks to be more of an international/universal language. I think Esperanto is more widely spoken?
Both are apparently somewhat easier to learn than other languages.
So which one?
[+] [-] rayalez|10 years ago|reply
To me the appeal of Lojban is in "expanding your mind" and using different tools for thinking.
Also, I've recently read somewhere people recommending to learn a sign language, so that is a thing you might want to consider. They say that it is easy to learn and is very different from English(hence - interesting).
[+] [-] qznc|10 years ago|reply
Consider yourself a Java/C++/Javascript programmer. Now Lojban is like Haskell. Very different and it will probably expand your mind. Esperanto is like Ruby or Go. Not that different but a lot of fun.
[+] [-] trenchant|10 years ago|reply
> To all the language curmudgeons out there who insist that people ought to speak more logically, I say, be careful what you wish for. You go on about the "logical" mismatch between "everyone" and "their" in perfectly normal sounding sentences like "Everyone clapped their hands." You argue that phrases like "very unique" and "sufficiently enough" don't make logical sense. You harp on "hopefully" and "literally" and "the reason is because," all the while calling logic to your side to defend your righteous anger. Before you judge me as some kind of "anything goes" language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.
> And oh, how grateful I am. Do you know how good we have it, how much easier our speaking lives are made by the fact that language and logic part ways? Consider the word "and." Why, you barely have to know what you mean when you say it! When you say you “like ham and eggs” do you have to specify whether you like each of those things as evaluated on its own merits separately or whether you like them served together as an entrée? No. You just lazily throw out your "and" and let context do the rest of the work for you. When you say you “woke up and ate breakfast” do you mean that you woke up first and then ate breakfast? Or did you do the two things simultaneously? Or, maybe your breakfast was asleep, so you woke it up and then ate it. Pshaw, you say. You know what I mean. Perhaps I do, says the Lojbanist. Perhaps I don’t.
Taking on the project of learning a logical language like Lojban may not end in your being able to speak the language well, but who cares--you will learn a lot about linguistics and you will focus on potential ambiguity in how you use English or other languages.
By comparison, Esperanto's grammar is very easy--sixteen rules, easily learned by anyone familiar with a European language. It's wonderful to have a learning curve that is so short.
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leke|10 years ago|reply
Site: http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/
Book: http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/Angos+Grammar
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baisong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david-given|10 years ago|reply
Did You Know... Lojban's regular enough that there's a yacc grammar for it? http://www.lojban.org/publications/formal-grammars/grammar.3...
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
That doesn't change my opinion though, that it doesn't matter much with which you start.
[+] [-] jejones3141|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|10 years ago|reply
Obviously the benefit is going to be smaller if you don't speak one of the major source languages, but it still seems like a reasonable strategy to me for selecting vocabulary in an artificial language.
[+] [-] Jack000|10 years ago|reply
I would think that a language based on predicate logic would be less efficient at communicating oft-expressed things, like a Huffman code dictionary where all the entries are weighted equally.
[+] [-] omginternets|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldlework|10 years ago|reply
If you can absorb what's in this video, you could probably pick up lojban with little effort on the grammar side. Alas, vocabulary is just something you have to get through.
[+] [-] undertow|10 years ago|reply
Phonemes aside, why would anyone design that, and imagine it as a feature and not a bug?
[+] [-] gleki|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmmbvnr_|10 years ago|reply
It's like Brainfuck, but for natural language.
[+] [-] lifeformed|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doublec|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emad1234|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] emad1234|10 years ago|reply
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