
Inventing a whole language - ghosh
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/how-to-invent-a-language-tolkien-burgess/
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dmichulke
An example that gave (and still gives) me the creeps: A guy seeing videos with
lots of blood (vino) and a gang rape (the old in-out)

 _And then, what do you know, soon our dear old friend, the red, red vino on
tap, the same in all places like it 's put out by the same big firm, began to
flow. It was beautiful. It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem
really real when you viddy them on the screen. Now all the time I was watching
this, I was beginning to get very aware of like not feeling all that well, and
this I put down to all the rich food and vitamins, but I tried to forget this,
concentrating on the next film which jumped right away on a young devotchka
who was being given the old in-out, in-out first by one malchick, then
another, then another...When it came to the sixth or seventh malchick, leering
and smecking and then going into it, I began to feel really sick._

From Clockwork Orange

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fusiongyro
I have been learning Lojban off-and-on for a while. I think the core idea
behind it is very interesting: sentences as logical predicates. The root word
concept is powerful. But I feel like most of the rest of it is too complex.
They could have would up with Prolog. Instead they wound up with C++, where
everything they could think of wound up in the language. That said, it's still
big and inspiring. But a lot of talk about Lojban turns into talking about
whether a sentence is valid or not.

The software ecosystem around it has grown up a huge amount in the last few
years.

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kmicklas
Lojban would have been infinitely more promising if it didn't force you to
memorize a completely arbitrary argument template for each root and instead
used standardized semantic role prepositions (destination, agent, reason,
instrument, etc.).

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schoen
There is an argument about that here:
[https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system](https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system)

I think your position is more persuasive, although I've never argued about
this with an expert Lojbanist.

I speculate that overall they feel that (1) there could be dozens or hundreds
of different cases reflecting the role that a noun plays in a particular
predicate relationship, (2) most don't apply at all to any given selbri
[predicate relationship], (3) [an argument made in this page] some people's
feeling of which case is appropriate for describing a particular relationship
is culturally arbitrary, as they differ significantly from natural language to
natural language, and (4) they don't want to _force_ the use of prepositions,
for concision.

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fusiongyro
Even with "just" transitive verbs taking three arguments, it's easy to lose
the plot in natural languages like English. The idea that it wouldn't happen
in unmarked sentences with two more seems absurd to me. They found some
natural relationships that happened to have five members and they had five
vowels, so the whole FA series came from that. Also the SE series only seems
speakable for se/te. Beyond that, I think it would be a head-scratcher in
English.

I also think even if people are getting fluent in Lojban, they're unlikely to
be gracefully handling free word order scenarios where the selbri shows up not
in position 2. Are there SOV-speakers producing SOV-ish shaped Lojban and
everybody is getting along fine?

If you look at the official cmavo list above, FA and SE account for five words
each, so ten of the 1000 in the list. Of course, they're pretty productive as
prefixes too, so more than that. But I think part of what makes it complex is
that there are so many of everything... forethought and afterthought of all
the connectives; differently typed connectives for combining sumti, selbri,
bridi; the non-obligatory tense/aspect/mood system that accounts for probably
at least 40 particles; etc.

It's a neat language. There's a lot of neat stuff in it. I'm sure it's fun to
be able to speak and understand it. I guess mainly I think it doesn't speak to
your innate language facility's strengths, so I doubt it can be done realtime
as a language, as specified. It can clearly be done with our reasoning
faculties. Maybe that's enough.

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schoen
I have a feeling that the things in Lojban that are semantically significant
and super-hard to keep track of in real time in your head go pretty far beyond
the noun case system. :-)

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fusiongyro
I agree, but I feel like, if simple things are hard, what will hard things be
like? :) Then again maybe with practice it becomes easier?

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takk309
Here is an episode of Lexicon Valley with an interview with David J. Peterson,
the language creator for Game of Thrones. [1] The amount of depth that has
been put into the Dothraki language is very impressive.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/05/lexicon_valley_dothraki_and_valyrian_inventor_david_j_peterson_on_creating.html)

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milesrout
[http://reddit.com/r/conlangs](http://reddit.com/r/conlangs) is a wonderful
community of language creators (conlang = constructed language). It's
surprisingly popular, there are many posts a day there. There are other forums
and blogs and such as well.

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throwaway7645
I actually like the idea of invented auxiliary languages like Esperanto. I've
spent 10% of the time on it that I did on Spanish in HS and understand
probably 5x as much due to the grammar. No gendered nouns, suffixes and
prefixes on words to keep extraneous vocabulary down...etc. Also, having one
sound per letter and no trilling R is nice.

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kmicklas
Really the biggest reason Esperanto is easy is that it doesn't have a whole
culture constantly pumping in new slang and arcane idioms. You can see a word
used once or twice and be reasonably certain that you are not missing some
subtle nuance or alternative meaning.

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throwaway7645
Well it does have a culture. Lots of conventions, original literature and
music...etc, but yea even that isn't the same as a culture of millions.

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kmicklas
The biggest difference isn't the raw number participating in the culture but
rather that Esperantists mostly keep in mind the goals of semantic
transparency and simplicity when coining new words and idioms.

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JoeDaDude
People interested in this topic will enjoy the book "In the Land of Invented
Languages" by Akira Okrent [1]. It's an easy non-technical read.

[1][http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/](http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/)

