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.
Lojban
11–20 of 93 posts
Re: Lojban
#12Boy, 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?).
Re: Lojban
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
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.
>exactly the kind of language that an artist or poet wouldn't want to learn //
Are you a poet?
I've dabbled in poetry - in part for many poets it's about exploring a language and pushing the confines of a languages ability to express something (eg the human condition).
Photorealism can be used in abstract art.
Re: Lojban
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
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.
Lojbanists have written poetry in lojban. Some writings on the matter:
http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/poetry.html http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms
Re: Lojban
#15Learning 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?
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.
Did You Know... Lojban's regular enough that there's a yacc grammar for it? http://www.lojban.org/publications/formal-grammars/grammar.3...
Re: Lojban
#16Boy, 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 ma…
Hmm.
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.
Re: Lojban
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>Every little step you learn of a language also improves your global understanding and therefore wasn't wasted. // Global understanding of what? Suppose the language isn't spoken/used by many people and has a different grammar to all other languages. You may never use the language and it's grammatical structure won't help you with any other language that you do use ... so then, what would be the advantage? Wouldn't l…
Because language, to a large decree, determines your mode of thought. By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently. It doesn't matter whether you actually use it to talk to people or not.
For example: some African languages don't have temporal tenses --- they don't distinguish between past, present and future. Some Scandinavian languages don't have gender, anywhere. Some languages (though I've forgotten which) don't have possessive pronouns. All of these will expose you to new modes of thought.
It's precisely the same concept as learning as many programming languages as you can; learning Forth will make you write better C. Learning Lojban will make you speak better English.
Re: Lojban
#18Reminds me of the invented languages Tolkien's Elvish and the language of the Talan in Outcast (video game).
Re: Lojban
#19I'm rather like Solresol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol
It's like Brainfuck, but for natural language.
Re: Lojban
#20Boy, 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 ma…
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.