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?).
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.
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.
It was fun to learn, and it gave me some ideas that got me going in natural language processing despite that it's not a natural language.
The argument structures were one of the big problems I had with it, too: it seemed like someone coming up with predicates just kept tacking on more arguments that were not at all essential to the predicate, in case someone wanted them. This lacks elegance.
Also, the grammar needs an overhaul. There are hundreds of PEG nodes, some of them are almost the same as others except that things you'd want to say are unexpectedly ungrammatical, and some of them could never be used at all except in an interplanetary spelling bee.
I emphasize that this did not stop me from enjoying it, and much later writing an MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle in it [1]. (warning: Mystery Hunt puzzles are hard)
I went by oskar2379. I did a search and only came across one post from my teenage self, linked below. You can see I was complaining about the predicates back then, too =)
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.
Hey, guess what! There are single-syllable cmavo for doing exactly this! fa, fe, fi, fo and fu, respectively. Although the docs warn against using them too much because they might be hard to parse.
I remember learning quite a bit of Lojban back in 1989 using a flashcard program on my PC. I even subscribed to Bob LeChevalier's newsletter for a while. I drifted away from it probably because it wasn't solving a problem that I had, cool as it was in theory. It was probably more interesting to construct the language than to use it.
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.
True or not, here's a very practical line of reasoning:
* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in one's first acquired natural language takes about four years.
* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in each subsequent acquired natural language takes about two years.[0]
* Learning a clean "constructed" language is reasonably efficient. Fluency in Esperanto or Lojban, for example, can be attained in as little as one year.
* Thus to learn, say, Swedish, it's fastest to learn Lojban first in one year, and then Swedish is a subsequent acquired language and only takes an additional two years.
* Conclusion: It's faster to learn "(Esperanto|Lojban) Swedish" than it is to learn Swedish alone.
I don't entirely subscribe to this theory, but it's an interesting speculation.
For me, I learned some constructed languages because I wondered if they would provoke the Sapir-Whorf effect. Anecdata: They did.
[0] The rationale is that the first requires un-learning things you've always taken for granted with regards your cradle language. Learning subsequent languages doesn't require that "un-learning, and so is quicker."
The polyglots I know all agree with a moderate form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that the language(s) you use affect what and how you think. In fact, when I say that some linguists find it controversial they look at me as if I'm demented. They just take it for granted that it's true.
BTW, this is often confused/conflated with "linguistic relativity"[0] and I'm not going to get into where one ends and the other starts. More, it seems that the effects are different for coordinate multilinguals versus compound multilinguals.[+]
Pinker says in "The Language Instinct"[1] that careful experiments show that it's nonsense. On the other hand, more recent work suggests that the effect is real, and that speaking a different language can result in measurable differences in your modes of thought, perception of time, and even your personality.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
So I was curious, but I didn't have time to learn an entire new language. But then I heard of LogLan, and subsequently Lojban, which was originally designed specifically for the purpose of testing this idea. The reasoning goes like this:
* Design a language that has something specific that is not present in any known "natural" language.
* Learn to speak it, and preferably raise some children with it as (one of) their cradle language(s)
* Measure their thinking and see if there are differences
* Use that to design a careful experiment to test the hypothesised effects.
So I learned (some) lojban in the hope that I would see some changes in my thinking. And I did. Specifically, after the weekend I spent learning the tense (spatial and temporal) system I found myself using tenses that I don't believe I'd ever used before. Someone asked if I'd enjoyed a party, and I started my reply with:
"I would have had been having a good time,
except that ..."
So I strongly believe that studying another language affects how you perceive things, and how you think about things.
[+] It is suggested that coordinate multilinguals[8] do not experience the same effects as compound multilinguals[8], even if they are equally fluent. A friend of mine, now sadly deceased, never completed his PhD, but his work showed an extremely clear split between coordinate and compound bilinguals (English/German) wherein the compound bilinguals showed a clear change of personality as they shifted language, but the coordinate bilinguals showed no measurable change. He never published, I only have a copy of his thesis without the data, and I promised I would never release it.
Just to define some terms, for the benefit of other readers:
a) Coordinate Bilingualism: In this type, the person learns the languages in separate environments, and words of the two languages are kept separate with each word having its own specific meaning. An instance of this is seen in a Cameroonian child learning English at school. This may also be referred to as subtractive bilingualism.
b) Compound Bilingualism: Here, the person learns the two languages in the same context where they are used concurrently, so that there is a fused representation of the languages in the brain. This is the case when a child is brought up by bilingual parents, or those from two different linguistic backgrounds. This is additive in nature.
I have interest in these languages because, in general, I have high appreciation for simple solutions to complex problems. I find very interesting how they solve different challenges.
I just learn a bit about them, but do not learn to speak, at least not enough to have the simplest conversation. But I understand how you could get more hooked into it and learn it and spend many hours with your toy language.
From all the unuseful hobbies people have, I do not think learning artificial languages is one of the worse.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My mum learned Esperanto - main motivation a kind of idealism where the world can come together with a common language without any particular culture dominating the others in the way you would tend to get if you chose say English as the common language. It also can be a social thing to meet others with a similar worldview.
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.
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...
>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?
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" aliens are using a prototype language like Javascript, instead of a class based language like Java. I think we need a programming language that takes this to its natural conclusion, where everything is expressed as weighted directed associations between objects (or weights on ordered lists of objects).
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.
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).
>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.
Unless you find Chinese or Chinese culture really interesting or have a more mercenary reason to learn Chinese I'd recommend Spanish. I've lived in China for three years and have been learning Mandarin in a half assed fashion since I got here. It's just ludicrously hard. For the same number of hours of work I'd be ahead in Spanish at this stage, easily, and if I'd been living in a Hispanophone country the whole time I'd be able to read and understand at a high level, and probably speak and be understood well.
Learning Chinese will often take up all your free time if you want to do it right. You cant pick it up half assed like other languages. Ive been learning it pretty hard the last 7 months and am pretty conversational but still get lost in conversations often, but can always clarify meaning by asking various questions, so I have attained an awkard level of fluency.
I recommend only speaking Chinese and forgoing English at all times, unless youre talking to someone who cant speak Chinese.
My friend has much better listening comprehension skills and has been here about 18 months, and Im on track to be on his level soon. We actually try, though. To be honest, most people hardly try.
I think it's probably easier to learn the phonetics of Chinese than reading/writing at first and bootstrap from there. Most of the written information in Latin languages are contained in the first and last characters of each word, while in Chinese it's in the outer edges of each character. The tones are a bit tough for non-native speakers, but they're very consistent so once you "get it" it becomes much easier.
Also you need to actually visit China to take advantage of the "extending the number of people you can communicate with" benefit.
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).
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.
Not knowing either of them. However I find myself interest as well and read around a little. My conclusion:
Consider yourself a Java/C++/Javascript programmer. Now Lojban is like Haskell. Very different and it will probably expand your mind. Esperanto is like Ruby or Go. Not that different but a lot of fun.
Lojban is logical but very difficult; it is so logical that the mental discipline required to use it correctly far exceeds that of natural languages. (Which may be an insight into why natural languages are not logical). Quoting Akira Okrent:
> To all the language curmudgeons out there who insist that people ought to speak more logically, I say, be careful what you wish for. You go on about the "logical" mismatch between "everyone" and "their" in perfectly normal sounding sentences like "Everyone clapped their hands." You argue that phrases like "very unique" and "sufficiently enough" don't make logical sense. You harp on "hopefully" and "literally" and "the reason is because," all the while calling logic to your side to defend your righteous anger. Before you judge me as some kind of "anything goes" language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.
> And oh, how grateful I am. Do you know how good we have it, how much easier our speaking lives are made by the fact that language and logic part ways? Consider the word "and." Why, you barely have to know what you mean when you say it! When you say you “like ham and eggs” do you have to specify whether you like each of those things as evaluated on its own merits separately or whether you like them served together as an entrée? No. You just lazily throw out your "and" and let context do the rest of the work for you. When you say you “woke up and ate breakfast” do you mean that you woke up first and then ate breakfast? Or did you do the two things simultaneously? Or, maybe your breakfast was asleep, so you woke it up and then ate it. Pshaw, you say. You know what I mean. Perhaps I do, says the Lojbanist. Perhaps I don’t.
Taking on the project of learning a logical language like Lojban may not end in your being able to speak the language well, but who cares--you will learn a lot about linguistics and you will focus on potential ambiguity in how you use English or other languages.
By comparison, Esperanto's grammar is very easy--sixteen rules, easily learned by anyone familiar with a European language. It's wonderful to have a learning curve that is so short.
Please don't trivialise Esperanto by referring to the century-old "sixteen rules myth," this is harmful to people with a starting interest in the language.
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 learning a more widely spoken/used language be more advantageous [unless you've a specific goal like reading a text or speaking to an individual]?
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.
Less flippantly, I believe in 1980 it was for most people a better use of one's time to read "The Selfish Gene" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach" than to learn Linear B, in order to think and reason differently. (I specify a date since the main ideas described in those books now pervade culture, so they would have less of an impact now.)
Regarding Scandinavian languages and gender, "Norwegian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter—except the Bergen dialect, which has only two genders: common and neuter." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language). Danish and Swedish have two grammatical genders, common and neuter.
Traces of a masculine gender remain in Swedish when used to refer to a male. For example, "den rika" could mean "the rich", while "den rike" means "the rich man". However, it's perfectly fine to use "den rika" for the rich man.
All of the Scandinavian languages have more of a gender system than English does, so I think it's a bit odd to use that property as an example. Could you explain why learning (say) the Swedish gender system helps one think and reason differently in any useful form, other than the obvious one of being able to comprehend Swedish and related languages?
In English you have time. You say if something [happens] at some time, [is happening] now, has [happened] or [will happen]. In Chinese, for instance, you don't have grammar for that (=no tense). But you have grammar to determine if that what's happening has started to happen, is in the middle of happening (not sure how to express that in English), is finished and in many regards even what result was achieved (=aspect). You can't say "it happened" but you can say "happen-stateChanged". You also can't say "I found" but you can say "I search-done".
Now even if you try to communicate in a language with tense but without aspect you are able to communicate better because you know there are two things to think about, when something happened related to you (tense) and how that activity is related to the flow of time (aspect). You will find that even languages without one kind of grammar will have a way to express something similar (e.g. in English perfect/imperfect is expressed with tense). You might even be able to do something an untrained native of your target language might not be able to do: When there are different nearly similar ways to say something you might be able to choose the better alternative and distinguish between both of them because of your deeper understanding of grammar.
I believe my response wasn't clear enough. I don't believe that the statement "By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently." is useful.
I do not think it's useful for most people to learn Linear B. Instead, I think there are more effective ways to 'learn how to think and reason differently' in the same amount of time, if that's one's goal.
In addition, the comment about genderless Scandinavian languages is incorrect. There are at least two genders (in the grammar sense), and those languages have more of a gender influence than English does. One shouldn't learn Swedish to understand how a genderless language works.
That isn't to say that learning a language is pointless or that it can't lead to a different view on how to think. Rather, that the blanket statement doesn't contain useful advice, and one of the specific examples appears to be incorrect.
With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought.
Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered anything like similar in Gaelic, even though they're usually translated into English as the same word. So, if you think about colours in Gaelic you're going to reason about them in a very different way than if you are in English.
To expand on my reasoning with Finnish is: in English, we have two (well, five, but only two are of interest here) pronouns, which are gendered: he and she. This means that it's much easier to talk about two people in a single sentence if they're of different sexes. "He opened the door using her key." If the person who owns the key is also male, we can't use this construction unambiguously, so we need to rephrase.
Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän. So Finnish can't use the construction above. In order to say that, they'll always have to explicitly choose some other means to disambiguate the people. "The locksmith opened the door using the customer's key." "The large person opened the door using the small person's key."
Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish.
The same reasoning applies to any place where a symbol or construct in one sentence doesn't map 1:1 onto the same symbol or construct in another, which is all of them. Learning and internalising a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit.
Ahh, I see the source of the confusion. Finnish is a Nordic language, but not a Scandinavian language.
If someone wants to appreciate differences in color perception, is it better to learn Scottish Gaelic or read Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" or similar works since 1969? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_i... for the differences in blue and green across many different languages.
This is why I argue that if the goal is to "think and reason differently" then learning a new language should not be high on the list. Instead, learning a new language has a side effect of thinking and reasoning differently, but so do many other topics. I believe there are easier ways achieve that goal than learning a new language.
Your 'key' example is resolved in Swedish with a special term for his/her own X. Compare "Han öppnade dörren med sin nyckel" (He opened the door with his own key) with "Han öppnade dörren med hans nyckel" (He opened the door with some other male's key.)
GEB is also all about recursion. I remember in my own learning how tough it was to understand recursion and induction. I consider that a mode of thought.
There's also the essay in GEB about the difficulties of language translation, such as the street name in Crime and Punishment. He goes into several pages about the different aspects of that translation. I consider that an aspect of the same mode of thought you are talking about. Further, in "Metamagical Themas" he covers aspects of gender neutrality in Chinese. Reading his essays seems much easier than learning Finnish.
I'm not arguing against your conclusion, which is that "Learning _and internalising_ a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit" but against the implication that learning a new way to think is one of the reasons to learn a new language. I think that's poor advice given other methods to learn new ways of thinking.
Further, languages are not equal. The Swedish mode of thought is very similar to English, so you might end up after a couple of years of study with only a few small insights that could have been more easily learned by reading a linguistics textbook.
>Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish. //
I don't think your conclusion follows. We elicit a sentence that externally shortcuts the designation of who does what by using pronouns where it seems still clear. But that doesn't mean we reason any differently internally about the subjects and objects. With a sentence like:
"The mother gave the sommelier a wave."
Being spoken as:
"She gave him a wave."
It seems quite reasonable to imagine that we perceive in our mind's eye the subject and object in the same way but extract the pertinent information as appropriate. A simpler sentence could be the result of a more complex process.
But then we come across this sort of issue within English too because we come across ambiguous situations "they gave me the other's key". Or perhaps ...
A: "She gave me her key"
B: "Who?"
A: "The girl gave me her key."
B: "Why did the girl have a key?"
A: "No I mean the girl gave me the mother's key."
The reasoning about the people was clearly about a girl and a mother in the first sentence but the expression of that reason wasn't elicited until the final one - I don't think the mental model has changed anywhere is such an exchange. Thus I don't see why there needs be a different internal model being used in your [david-given's] example.
In your red example if someone tells me "he has red hair" red refers to a different thing to "his door is red" - red _hair_ is what we call ginger hair usually. It's not that Gael's think of red differently IMO it's just a limitation of English expression. The expression doesn't reflect the internal model well.
I certainly don't think in language. Easy evidence: I know the idea of what I want to say, but I totally forget the word. Language is just something I have to compile to once the idea is fully formed.
I understand that lots of people actually do think in language, but you shouldn't assume that everyone follows the same mental process.
Just because you can't think of a particular word at a given moment, do not assume that you are thereby not thinking in the language. Experiments show that it is far, far more subtle than you might imagine, and that your language affects how you think in ways you might not expect.
I've participated in experiments[0] that clearly showed that my perceptions of what was happening in my head with regards language were simply not true. Introspection is extremely subjective, and very poor at getting at reality.
[0] Participation required an NDA, so I can't tell you more.
> it's grammatical structure won't help you with any other language that you do use
Actually it will teach you something real. It may be artificial but it possesses the ability to get an idea that's in your head into the head of another person. Therefore it's real. Also artificial languages don't come from nothing. They are based on what its author knew about languages.
> Wouldn't learning a more widely spoken/used language be more advantageous[...]?
Depends. If it's related to a language you want to use, then yes. But a real language also has disadvantages like exceptions to the grammar rules, illogical rules (Do you know that chair is male in German?), and a dominant group of people who pushes that language forward without considering your situation (natives are kind of arrogant in that way).
I learn Chinese for over 5 years and am not fluent. I also know a lot of Chinese who have spent considerable amounts of their lives (some up to 20 years) and are still easily distinguished as foreigners when speaking German. If your native language belongs to one of the bigger European families then it might only take 6 weeks to get your Esperanto to fluency! So if you have never acquired a second or third languae by yourself then learning one of these two might help you learn to learn languages (I can tell you from experience that it's something you really need to learn if you want to get to any reasonable level in another language).
Last but not least the question in the previous comment wasn't "What's the most valuable thing to do right now?" but the question was to choose either language A or B.
This comes up often, but it turns out to be pretty crappy, in practice, for a few reasons.
First, although it's not ambiguous, it's vague. It's considered good practice to leave empty places that are not immediately relevant to the conversation. The way this works is kinda like if every every sentence is a function call with arguments, and every argument has a default value; according to the language spec, though, the default value for each argument is to be inferred from context.
Second, it's often referentially ambiguous (e.g. "the bear" doesn't necessarily uniquely identify an entity), and its system of anaphora (think pronouns), although different than English's is insufficiently precise for computer communication.
Third, there are other languages which are designed with that goal in mind, and which are more natural. I'm thinking specifically of Attempto Controlled English.
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.
I agree that Lojban is a "research language", but that is certainly a good thing! Seen in relation to its size/popularity, quite a large amount of research in linguistics and computer science sprouted from it. I myself have comitted a master's thesis to the language [1] (on p. 29 I attempt to summarize where it was picked up in academia)
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.
One more point that wasn't mentioned before. While both conlangs might be interesting, some people might argue that Esperanto is more valuable because there actual native speakers. It's true that one guy created that language just by himself, but nowadays there are people who learn and speak that language when they grow up.
That doesn't change my opinion though, that it doesn't matter much with which you start.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?).