

Lojban - a logical (human) language - gnosis
http://neptune.spaceports.com/~words/lojban.html

======
skermes
Descended from Loglan, whence came the old joke,

How many Loglan speakers does it take to fix a broken light bulb?

Two. One to fix it, and another to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken
light.

In all seriousness, though, one of the things I treasure most about our
squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain. Being able to
construct sentences that mean two (or three, or more) things at once and
playing around with the intersections of polysemy
(<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2079>) and listener context is great
fun. I feel like you lose some of that when you take inspiration for your
language as much from predicate calculus as from Chinese.

~~~
Towle_
> one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how
> much ambiguity they contain

Agreed. Designed languages lack...poetry.

~~~
jey
False. <http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lojban+poetry>

~~~
Towle_
And p.s.-- that's not poetry, it's "poetry"

~~~
jey
It's more of a proof of concept than high literature -- keep in mind that
Lojban is a _very_ young language, and there aren't many people even truly
fluent in it.

~~~
Towle_
Any language's poetry draws its meaning, its form, its essence from the words
of those millions of people who expressed their ideas and themselves in that
language. No contrived language is ever going to be able to express a thought
with the same weight, for example, that "wherefore art thou Romeo?" is
expressed in English. It's just not possible, and translated meaning isn't
enough. You will never have Giants' shoulders to stand on.

~~~
gnosis
Translated meaning isn't enough? So I suppose all those translations of
Shakespeare in to hundreds of human languages isn't enough either; and anyone
who claims Shakespeare can be appreciated in anything but English is just
"lying to himself and others" (as you said in an earlier post).

Sure, any young language isn't going to have a rich history of expressions
weighed down with meaning. But I don't think that has anything to do with
whether the language is deliberately invented or not. With time, assuming the
language is used by a significant number of people, it will acquire such a
history.

Still, while young languages don't have a rich history compared to older
languages, they have other advantages (of which Lojban has plenty).

Also remember that the history that has accrued to older languages is a
double-edged sword. Because of this "baggage" it's sometimes difficult to
express precisely what you mean without being misunderstood (or perhaps to
even know what you mean -- see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Lojban is designed
to help overcome such difficulties.

The other thing to note is that the weighty phrases like "wherefore art thou
Romeo?" aren't used very much in everyday speech. It's not like we go around
constantly quoting Shakespeare at one another (except occasionally for effect,
or humor). We generally communicate using rather simple language and concepts
that should have no problem being expressed in even a young (but expressive)
language like Lojban.

~~~
Towle_
>So I suppose ... anyone who claims Shakespeare can be appreciated in anything
but English is just "lying to himself and others" (as you said in an earlier
post).

It cannot be appreciated to the same degree, no. Just as a 6-year-old cannot
appreciate Shakespeare to the same degree that a 50-year-old English
literature professor can appreciate it. How this is at all debatable, I have
no idea.

> With time, assuming the language is used by a significant number of people,
> it will acquire such a history.

This will of course never happen.

> Still, while young languages don't have a rich history compared to older
> languages, they have other advantages (of which Lojban has plenty).

There are alternative solutions to requiring everyone to learn a second
language. For example, expressing oneself more clearly. This can be
accomplished to any desired degree in modern languages.

> Also remember that the history that has accrued to older languages is a
> double-edged sword. Because of this "baggage" it's sometimes difficult to
> express precisely what you mean without being misunderstood (or perhaps to
> even know what you mean -- see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Lojban is
> designed to help overcome such difficulties.

On one edge of the sword: the lasting effects of the most skilled manipulators
of the given language. The other edge: occasional difficulties with ambiguity
and linguistic relativity. To dull the second edge, Lojban requires that we
flatten the first. No thanks.

~~~
gnosis

      > > With time, assuming the language is used by a significant
      > > number of people, it will acquire such a history.
      >
      > This will of course never happen.
    

"Man flying? Impossible!" "A man walking on the moon? Preposterous!"
"Slavery/segregation is the natural state of man and will never change." "The
Third Reich will last a thousand years." "The Soviet Union will never collapse
in our lifetime."

History is full of surprises.

Sure, today Lojban is a fringe language with a few thousand speakers, tops.
And there's no indication of any kind of widespread movement to adopt it. But
that could change with time. The language is really in its infancy.

Of course, it's not likely it'll ever be as popular as any of the major
natural languages are today, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of
hundreds of thousands or even millions of people speaking it (or a future
offspring of it) one day.

~~~
Towle_
Every one of your listed false predictions held within it an inherently great
value to prove wrong, a value so enormous and ungodly that anywhere from
thousands to billions of spirited men and women pushed everything else in
their lives aside for that one cause. They made that choice to give their
lives singular purpose because the importance of the goals they pursued
necessitated nothing less, and what they knew to be potentially massive
benefit to all mankind outweighed everything else in their lives.

This goal of millions of speakers of Lojban would require that same monumental
level of collective human effort and perseverance, but it does not necessitate
anything of that kind to anyone, nor will it ever, because the potential
benefit to mankind is just that marginal.

------
henrikschroder
_Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you
can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has
the "per" of English "person" and the ren of Chinese. cukta has the "ook" of
English "book", all of Chinese shu(c is pronounced "sh"), and part of Arabic
(and Turkish) kitap. vanju is like French vin and Chinese jiu. This makes
learning words easier for the largest number of people._

I want to physically reach through my monitor and strangle him for writing
that. Words in human languages are composed of morphemes, not letters. It's
easier to learn words in foreign languages if you know how to dissect a new
word into its morphemes so that you can read the meaning of the word.

By getting a five letter statistical average over completely different
langauges, the morphemes of the original words _will not be preserved_ , and
therefore you cannot look at a lojban root word, dissect it into morphemes,
and then read what it means.

"per" and "pre" are two completely different morphemes in english, the root of
"book" is not "ook", it's "bo". "vin" and "van" are two completely different
morphemes in French, etc, etc. The lojban words _are not similar_ to their
real-language roots in the same way that real words are to each other, instead
they're similar based on the mathematical distance between letters, which is
_completely useless_ for learning it.

You can sort of figure out the above examples after the fact, after you have
learnt the words, with the knowledge of what the word is in those eight
languages. But given a lojban word you have never seen before, you have _no
way_ of knowing what it means, even if you know the word in all those
languages.

~~~
sfwc
I don't think anyone claims that Lojban phonology will help people guess the
meaning of its root words. Even if you guess that {klama} means "travel", you
probably can't guess that it means precisely (x1 travels to destination x2
from origin x3 via route x4 using conveyance x5). As a native English speaker
who's been learning Lojban casually for a few weeks, I find the phonological
resemblances helpful mostly as mnemonics - {prenu} is easier to remember for
sounding a little like "person", {nitcu} like "need", et cetera. (And
remembering the place structures does get easier, there is a fairly consistent
rationale to how they are chosen.)

~~~
henrikschroder
No, but the author of the article claimed that you can see "bits of different
languages in them", which you can't. Neither morphemes nor phonemes are
preserved, only letters. The method for creating these words make it probable
that there will be at least one letter in the lojban word in common with the
word in the six original languages, but there seems to be no guarantee that
the letter or letters in common are from the actual root of the word, which
are the _important_ letters of the word.

Therefore, the way the root words in Lojban are constructed _does not_ make
the learning of words easier for the largest number of people, it just makes
it really difficult for everyone.

Take your example of "klama". I can see that it shares "l" and "a" with
"travel", but how do you construct a mnemonic for remembering it? It shares no
morphemes and no phonemes with "travel", and there's no phonological
resemblance either, so there's _nothing_ to help you learn it if you are an
English speaker, you just have to memorize it as-is.

I'm sure there are many other features of Lojban that are interesting, and I'm
sure that compound words in Lojban are pretty easy to learn and construct, but
the text I quoted from the article about root words shows a complete lack of
understanding of how human languages work and grow and evolve.

~~~
sfwc
It's not instantly clear from e.g.
<http://www.lojban.org/publications/etymology/etysample.txt> what the
algorithm was for the computerized part of the process of gismu construction,
although I doubt it was as naive as you seem to be implying. In any event, the
humans involved also played with the gloss words they were feeding it to try
and find good compromises. {klama} does not in fact take the "l" and "a" from
"travel" - it comes from (in Lojban's phonetic spelling) the English "kam"
(come), the Hindi "ana" and the Chinese "lai".

At worst, learning Lojban vocabulary is no worse than learning any foreign
language, and at best it's somewhat easier (which has been my experience) - I
certainly don't see how its phonology "just makes it really difficult for
everyone".

~~~
henrikschroder
Compare it with Esperanto: At best it's really easy because the word you want
to learn shares a lot of morphemes with some European language that you know,
and at worst there's no similarity to any language you know. If you are
Chinese it sucks all the way, but if you are Portuguese or Polish or English
you can sort of guess what unknown words in Esperanto means, you can guess,
you can wing it. It's biased towards European languages that way, and that is
something the article about Lojban pointed out that they wanted to explicitly
avoid when creating it.

But the result of their statistical average method is that _everyone_ has to
look up and memorize _every single root word_ when learning Lojban. It might
be easy to memorize them because of the simple spelling and that you know
they're all five letters long, and that there might be letters in common with
the word in your native language, but you have to do it for each of them.

Noone can look at a Lojban word and guess what it means, regardless of your
language background. You have no chance at guessing it correctly, you can't
wing it, you can't speak pidgin Lojban, you either know the root word for
something, or you don't, and if you don't you have to look it up. If the root
words had shared morphemes with other languages, then it would have been
easier for some people and harder for others, but since it doesn't share with
anyone, it's hard for everyone.

------
mnemonicsloth
"Oh, cool, a new Clojure library," I thought to myself.

Time to stop coding for a little while.

------
chaosmachine
<http://xkcd.com/191/>

------
psygnisfive
While Lojban is "logical", human language is not. Or rather, it is, but it
follows its own set of (well defined) rules. If Lojban does not follow these
rule's, it's not truly learnable, and thus irrelevant. If Lojban _does_ follow
these rules, and is genuinely learnable, then it offers little advantage
except perhaps a pared down vocabulary that avoids ambiguity and redundancy,
and a less flexible morphology and syntax. Assuming the latter, human
languages change naturally, in order to facilitate learning and communication,
and Lojban would change too, if actually used. Metaphor, ambiguity,
imprecision, etc. all are the _products_ of language adapting itself to suit
our needs better. So for all the "flaws" of natural languages, they work, and
work well, and if Lojban were adopted by people, it would end up looking like
a natural language, with all their "flaws". And that's a good thing.

------
keefe
On one of my consulting engagements, I met this guy who decided to try to
raise his kid speaking klingon. The kid just showed no interest in it
whatsoever, even though that is all that dad spoke to him for 2 years. I think
a natural language has to evolve, perhaps something related to how our brains
process language.

~~~
gnosis
I don't know how much we can really infer from one kid's dislike of Klingon.
It's not exactly a statistically significant sampling.

~~~
keefe
Fair point, but in the absence of empirical data to the contrary anecdotal
evidence supporting the intuitive point of view is something.

------
DenisM
Wow, so this is the lifehacker's Klingon?

