
Lojban - rayalez
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
======
gw
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?).

~~~
ColinWright
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.

~~~
ColinWright
PS: Thanks for the sporadic upvotes on this - nice to know my comment was
interesting. Please consider upvoting this request for help:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629868)

Largely speaking it has sunk without trace, but another couple of votes will
get it to the "Ask" page, so there's a chance someone who can help me will see
it, and I'd appreciate that.

 _Edit: And almost immediately there 's a vote - thank you, I do really
appreciate that._

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runn1ng
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.

~~~
trio
Saluton,

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

~~~
xq
Hey. Forgive the stunted speech, but I must practice! :)

Mi komencas lerni Esperanton ĵus antaŭ unu semajno -- tra Duolingo, ke eble vi
atendas -- sed nun mi provas iri al pli realaj verkoj, plejparte tradukitaj
facilaj verkoj, tiuj mi leĝis en la anglan iam en mi vivo.

Kiam mi rigardis la Esperantajn grupojn en Meetup.com por la Bay Area, mi
memoras vidinta la nomon "trio" ien. Tiu estas vi, ĉu ne?

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JesperRavn
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.

~~~
deckiedan
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...

~~~
JesperRavn
> _So inventing languages is a good thing, as a research topic into how
> natural languages work (with plenty of provisos, of course)._

That might be your opinion, I don't think it's a useful research project. Are
you aware of any insights into natural language that have been arrived at via
artificial languages?

 _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..._

That seems very cynical. Why do you think artificial languages are so
important that misleading marketing is justified?

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sneak
The only reason I haven't started learning Lojban is because the only other
people I could practice speaking with are people who have learned Lojban.

~~~
stesch
[http://www.xkcd.com/191/](http://www.xkcd.com/191/)

~~~
sneak
xkcd is to nerds what Seinfeld is to comedy.

~~~
noonespecial
Its worse. Its approaching "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" territory amongst the
nerdy set. _(1)_

(1) It's turtles all the way down. _(1)_

~~~
tzs
Of course there is a Darmok and Jalad xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/902/](https://xkcd.com/902/)

~~~
noonespecial
Which is now the D&J@T xkcd for that particular episode of TNG...

So. Many. Turtles.

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eemax
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.

So which one?

~~~
rayalez
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).

~~~
parallelist
Yeah I agree with this. From a standpoint of access to the minds of more human
beings you can’t justify Esperanto when there are things like Spanish and
Mandarin you could learn.

Lojban is for thinking unambiguously and more logically. It's good for
programmers but also exactly the kind of language that an artist or poet
wouldn't want to learn.

~~~
doublec
Lojbanists have written poetry in lojban. Some writings on the matter:

[http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/poetry.html](http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/poetry.html)
[http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms](http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms)

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jejones3141
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.

~~~
ScottBurson
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.

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Jack000
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.

~~~
omginternets
Moreover, you'd expect languages based on predicate language to be identical
in their written and spoken forms.

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ldlework
I'll go ahead and plug my own introduction video which gives a light
introduction to the core grammar concepts in lojban:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjSTUK3hFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjSTUK3hFI)

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.

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undertow
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?

~~~
gleki
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?

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kmmbvnr_
I'm rather like Solresol
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol)

It's like Brainfuck, but for natural language.

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lifeformed
If everyone used Lojban, I wonder how it'd evolve? Surely people would develop
slang and shortcuts, until new dialects formed.

~~~
doublec
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.

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frik
Reminds me of the invented languages Tolkien's Elvish and the language of the
Talan in Outcast (video game).

