
Lojban - nullgeo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

~~~
andolanra
I _am_ an Esperanto speaker, so I can say that this is not really accurate.
Esperanto isn't a Romance language: it's got a lexicon that was drawn
haphazardly from many different languages—not just Romance ones, but also
Germanic and Slavic ones—in ways that render the source words difficult to
pronounce and very often result in words that are confusingly non-similar to
the original. For your past vocabulary to really contribute to knowing
Esperanto, you'd probably have to know English, French, a dash of German, and
maybe some Polish, and even then, the language is filled with false friends
and idiosyncratic choices. (From English, for example, it drew the word
_boato_ for 'boat': pronounced "boh-AH-toh", making it sound nothing like the
English word!)

And "the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent
languages"? Only in the most cursory ways! Esperanto's vocabulary is also
_deeply_ minimal: for example, it makes antonyms from the prefix _mal-_ , so
that 'big' is _granda_ and 'small' is _malgranda_ , and it makes heavy use of
affixes and word-combining to generate new chunks of vocabulary: a school is a
learn-place ( _lernejo_ ), lunch is day-eating ( _tagmanĝo_ ), a dictionary is
a word-group ( _vortaro_ ), and so forth. This is great for making a minimal
vocabulary that can be easily learned, but it means that you get only a tiny
fragment of knowledge that's transferrable to other languages.

I could go on about how the structure is actually deeply unnatural and
reflects several odd choices, or how the pronunciation involves tricky to
near-impossible consonant clusters (e.g. because _s_ is pronounced as 'ts',
the word _eksciis_ 'realize' has the cluster _kssts_!), but it's really not a
well put-together language in the way that this seems to imply it is.

~~~
tene
The most comprehensive document I've happened to personally encounter
discussing complaints with Esperanto is
[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html) . I am
not an Esperanto speaker, so I can't speak to the veracity of the complaints
there, but when I've seen it linked before, I don't recall seeing people
contradict it or claim it's from an inaccurate perspective.

~~~
andolanra
Again as an Esperanto-speaker, I can say that my only problem with this
document is that it can come across as a bit snarky and mean-spirited, but
this is pretty well addressed by the disclaimer
[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e)

I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it
needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most
of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws
with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I
interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand,
neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types
that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true
international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and
speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our
position there!

------
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%](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](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...](https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4034b)

------
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](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)

~~~
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](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.

~~~
Tenoki
A glottal stop is not really a normal letter (for example in German it is not
written at all), while the H is more of one, and it is written with a “'” in
Lojban.

Edit: The Lojban “'” can also be considered not to be a real phoneme but to be
more like a gilde sound between two vowels.

But maybe the glottal stop is only in German not considered to be a phoneme.
(Actually it is more of a short pause, the snap is only an easy but not
necessary way to do it.)

------
gleki
coi le munje .i coi se terdi

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

~~~
gleki
.i ue do za'o xu se bangu lo jbobau .i xu do nelci lo cnino jibri be do

