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Lojban

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Re: Lojban

#81

Post by BillChapman »

runn1ng wrote: post #62

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…

People learn Esperanto because it's useful - especially if you travel or have international interests. I have used Esperanto in Argentina, Cameroon and about fifteen European countries. We are seeing an upsurge in Esperanto at the moment because of the appearance of the Duolingo course. See: Duolinghttp://www.liberafolio.org/9-000-homoj-eklernis-esperanton-e...

Two days after the launch of Esperanto course at the popular language learning site Duolingo, the course has already gained almost ten thousand participants. The course still is not even officially launched, but is in its test phase. The course opened in its testing phase on Thursday 28 May at eight o'clock in the evening (M.E.T.) In less than two days, the course already had 9,600 registered participants, although it has not yet been actively advertised.

Re: Lojban

#82

Post by emad1234 »

I would like to take the chance to invite spanish tutors and students who are asking themselves how to learn spanish as a native speaker to have a free view on this excellent website that offers spanish conversation http://preply.com/en/skype/english-native-speakers I am currently taking spanish conversation classes online over there with native speakers and the quality presented is professional and satisfying

Re: Lojban

#83

Post by emad1234 »

I would like to take the chance to invite spanish tutors and students who are asking themselves how to learn spanish as a native speaker to have a free view on this excellent website that offers spanish conversation http://preply.com/en/skype/english-native-speakers I am currently taking spanish conversation classes online over there with native speakers and the quality presented is professional and satisfying

Re: Lojban

#84

Post by gleki »

runn1ng wrote: post #62

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…

Why learn Haskell if fewer people speak it compared to C++? The same can be applied to Lojban.

Re: Lojban

#85

Post by gleki »

qznc wrote: post #51
gleki wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And PEG too https://github.com/Ilmen-vodhr/ilmentufa/

So what is the actual class of the language? YACC means LALR(1) and PEG means LL(*), afaik. Can you write a LL(k) or even SLL(k) grammar?

If you mean particular values of k then modern Lojban isn't compatible with non-infinite lookahead although pragmatically a high value of k may do the trick on real texts. As for SLL I'm no expert, sorry.

Re: Lojban

#86

Post by gleki »

undertow wrote: post #78

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?

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?

Re: Lojban

#87

Post by trio »

runn1ng wrote: post #62

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…

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

Re: Lojban

#88

Post by hnyc »

schwarze_pest wrote: post #55
gandarojin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Mandarin is the most “popular” language in the world, not English. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

Popular? --> Sort by L2 speakers.

No, sort by total.

Re: Lojban

#89

Post by gleki »

trio wrote: post #87
runn1ng wrote: post #62

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…

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-nati…

Yeah, I can say the same about Lojban community. Most Lojbanists study and use Lojban to better know how we think, how can knowledge be better represented. As for other languages a lot of Lojbanists speak several major languages each so this means that Lojban can't be replaced by another major language.

Re: Lojban

#90

Post by gleki »

eemax wrote: post #5
rayalez wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

Are you able to think in lojban, then? The idea behind lojban appeals to me, but (according the the times article currently on the front page of HN), there's an active community of Esperanto speakers in NYC. I'm not really interested in extending the number of people I can communicate with, but if I learn a new language, I would like to be able to actually speak it out loud with other people.

Most vocal chats in Lojban happen through the internet.
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