Lojban(en.wikipedia.org)
en.wikipedia.org
Lojban
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
9 comments
When I was playing with Toki Pona, a surprising amount of people were incredibly resistant to it, sometimes to the point of being upset about it, for... some reason I could never figure out. Never got a straight answer. I found the whole thing really, really bizarre.
Before anyone asks, it wasn't because I was speaking Toki Pona to them. I only speak it to friends that also know it, it's just that sometimes there are other people around.
Before anyone asks, it wasn't because I was speaking Toki Pona to them. I only speak it to friends that also know it, it's just that sometimes there are other people around.
I love utopian language communities. I finished out the Duolingo Esperanto course. And of course, a Lojbanist would tell you that Esperanto is too Euro-centric to be truly international, and not nearly as linguistically precise as Lojban.
In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.
In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.
Esperanto is really better-is-better: most of the world today either knows some English or speaks a romance language. Also, the language has a very natural structure to it, an a lexicon that seemingly (I'm not a speaker, but I have some familiarity) could've formed under a rather natural process of elite dominance---the hyphothesised means to Latinification of northern Mediterranean, and Turkification of the region that constitutes modern Turkey and thereabouts, for example; see "Before Babel", Renfrew, 1991---in central or eastern Europe. Thus, knowledge of many prominent world languages is transferible to Esperanto, and the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages. That is very valuable.
WRT English, there's nothing inherent to it that makes it the lingua franca of the world, it's just that it's the language of the dominating socio-economic powers since the British Empire. How quickly Mandarin is becoming popular around the world is a modern evidence to how economics play a role in determining the cultural appreciation of a particular country.
WRT English, there's nothing inherent to it that makes it the lingua franca of the world, it's just that it's the language of the dominating socio-economic powers since the British Empire. How quickly Mandarin is becoming popular around the world is a modern evidence to how economics play a role in determining the cultural appreciation of a particular country.
I am an Esperanto speaker, so I can say that this is not really accurate. Esperanto isn't a Romance language: it's got a lexicon that was drawn haphazardly from many different languages—not just Romance ones, but also Germanic and Slavic ones—in ways that render the source words difficult to pronounce and very often result in words that are confusingly non-similar to the original. For your past vocabulary to really contribute to knowing Esperanto, you'd probably have to know English, French, a dash of German, and maybe some Polish, and even then, the language is filled with false friends and idiosyncratic choices. (From English, for example, it drew the word boato for 'boat': pronounced "boh-AH-toh", making it sound nothing like the English word!)
And "the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages"? Only in the most cursory ways! Esperanto's vocabulary is also deeply minimal: for example, it makes antonyms from the prefix mal-, so that 'big' is granda and 'small' is malgranda, and it makes heavy use of affixes and word-combining to generate new chunks of vocabulary: a school is a learn-place (lernejo), lunch is day-eating (tagmanĝo), a dictionary is a word-group (vortaro), and so forth. This is great for making a minimal vocabulary that can be easily learned, but it means that you get only a tiny fragment of knowledge that's transferrable to other languages.
I could go on about how the structure is actually deeply unnatural and reflects several odd choices, or how the pronunciation involves tricky to near-impossible consonant clusters (e.g. because s is pronounced as 'ts', the word eksciis 'realize' has the cluster kssts!), but it's really not a well put-together language in the way that this seems to imply it is.
And "the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages"? Only in the most cursory ways! Esperanto's vocabulary is also deeply minimal: for example, it makes antonyms from the prefix mal-, so that 'big' is granda and 'small' is malgranda, and it makes heavy use of affixes and word-combining to generate new chunks of vocabulary: a school is a learn-place (lernejo), lunch is day-eating (tagmanĝo), a dictionary is a word-group (vortaro), and so forth. This is great for making a minimal vocabulary that can be easily learned, but it means that you get only a tiny fragment of knowledge that's transferrable to other languages.
I could go on about how the structure is actually deeply unnatural and reflects several odd choices, or how the pronunciation involves tricky to near-impossible consonant clusters (e.g. because s is pronounced as 'ts', the word eksciis 'realize' has the cluster kssts!), but it's really not a well put-together language in the way that this seems to imply it is.
The most comprehensive document I've happened to personally encounter discussing complaints with Esperanto is http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html . I am not an Esperanto speaker, so I can't speak to the veracity of the complaints there, but when I've seen it linked before, I don't recall seeing people contradict it or claim it's from an inaccurate perspective.
Again as an Esperanto-speaker, I can say that my only problem with this document is that it can come across as a bit snarky and mean-spirited, but this is pretty well addressed by the disclaimer http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e
I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand, neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our position there!
I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand, neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our position there!
I found it interesting the last time this came up on HN (not very long ago) to see http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/j.html, which includes several examples of the "boato" phenomenon.
I am an Esperanto speaker. Before I started learning Esperanto, I read that document. Now, I can say that a lot, if not most, of that document is FUD.
First of all, I have not said in any way that Esperanto is a romance language. I'm aware about the sources of the language's vocabulary.
For the rest, I really appreciate the "insider" view you give. A couple points, though:
- It's not said that a language that borrows a word will keep its original pronunciation too. The very word pronunciation, for example, the various pronunciations thereof in English, French, Italian, Spanish would not be easily recognisable as a cognate to the untrained ear. "Transformation rules" need to be learnt to make use of vocabulary similarities across languages.
- The "near-impossible consonant clusters" do occur in many natural languages. Armenian and Georgian, for one, are known for some wild consonant clusters they have. Furthermore, that "ksts" one exists in English: texts, sexts; and not radically more difficult than say the greek φθάνω.
For the rest, I really appreciate the "insider" view you give. A couple points, though:
- It's not said that a language that borrows a word will keep its original pronunciation too. The very word pronunciation, for example, the various pronunciations thereof in English, French, Italian, Spanish would not be easily recognisable as a cognate to the untrained ear. "Transformation rules" need to be learnt to make use of vocabulary similarities across languages.
- The "near-impossible consonant clusters" do occur in many natural languages. Armenian and Georgian, for one, are known for some wild consonant clusters they have. Furthermore, that "ksts" one exists in English: texts, sexts; and not radically more difficult than say the greek φθάνω.
People who claim that Esperanto is the worse-is-better do not really understand what is it. They merely see Esperanto from a strictly outsider’s view. Esperanto is the better-is-better.
Yes, was just explaining this to a colleague this morning. I tried to learn some Lojban.. was a good experience. I like that sentences start with a dot and capitals are thrown out. I even registered a lojban word domain name.
Some noteworthy bits:
* Vitalik Buterin reads/writes Lojban long before he started Ethereum
https://bitcointalk.to/index.php?topic=21007.msg%msg_id%
* Ben Goertzel of AGI fame dabbled in Lojban but decided on an English hybrid to skip learning the vocabulary but keeping the grammar
http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm
I've some good Esperanto books I chew on and lately I've been looking into Elefen and Ikthuil.
https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4...
I've some good Esperanto books I chew on and lately I've been looking into Elefen and Ikthuil.
https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4...
I took classes from lojbab when I was 16 or so waaay back in the 90s in Vienna. It seemed like a cool techie thing to do for a college freshman.
Now and then I look into it, where it is, etc. One thing I could not get past was that the language is ugly. It’s very hard on the ears - I say this speaking English, Japanese, and some Spanish and have taken a few years of Mandarin, so perhaps it’s a taste thing, but I’ve heard lots of people say this over the years and I agree with it.
Now and then I look into it, where it is, etc. One thing I could not get past was that the language is ugly. It’s very hard on the ears - I say this speaking English, Japanese, and some Spanish and have taken a few years of Mandarin, so perhaps it’s a taste thing, but I’ve heard lots of people say this over the years and I agree with it.
It only takes a day to learn the basics: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda
Anyone with an interest in the story of Lojban and a dozen other fascinating conlangs (constructed languages) should read "In the Land of Invented Languages". It's a terrific collection of tales of bizarre ego, hubris, and profound misunderstandings of how human ("natural") languages actually function in reality.
I love Lojban from the point of view of "eliminate ambiguity as a language feature", but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd. It also makes reading somewhat more difficult from anyone who uses a Latin character set and english-alike sentence structures (IMO, a single 100 level linguistics course does not make me an expert)
Eliminating syntactic (not semantic) ambiguity is indeed a noble goal, but I was kind of horrified when I first realized how it's done in Lojban. Practically every type of phrase has both its start and its end marked by a unique word or class of words, with the terminator usually optional in any context where dropping it would not result in any ambiguity. Knowing exactly when dropping a terminator would result in ambiguity is pretty difficult, and in practice is rare enough that seeing a terminator is something of a surprise and usually requires a trip to look it up in the dictionary.
It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).
It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).
> but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd
The ʻokina is sort of a precedent for this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop
although then people can have humongous arguments over whether it's correct to write it with ʻ, `, ', or other alternatives.
The ʻokina is sort of a precedent for this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop
although then people can have humongous arguments over whether it's correct to write it with ʻ, `, ', or other alternatives.
A glottal stop is not really a normal letter (for example in German it is not written at all), while the H is more of one, and it is written with a “'” in Lojban.
Edit: The Lojban “'” can also be considered not to be a real phoneme but to be more like a gilde sound between two vowels.
But maybe the glottal stop is only in German not considered to be a phoneme. (Actually it is more of a short pause, the snap is only an easy but not necessary way to do it.)
Edit: The Lojban “'” can also be considered not to be a real phoneme but to be more like a gilde sound between two vowels.
But maybe the glottal stop is only in German not considered to be a phoneme. (Actually it is more of a short pause, the snap is only an easy but not necessary way to do it.)
The letter thing is kinda understandable. They should have just used "h" instead of ' (even though that sound can technically be pronounced a number of ways, including as a dental fricative), but for the glottal stop "." which comes at the start and end of names and before particles that start with a vowel, I'm not sure anything else would work, while still being easy to type on a computer. The only other option that comes to mind is using one of the unused letters, but that might be even weirder, considering the latin alphabet doesn't have a letter for the glottal stop.
During a recent conversation, I realized that a lot of the community dysfunction there is the typical contrarian trap: If you're doing something sufficiently unusual, the vast majority of the people who show up to work on it with you are going to be extremely opinionated contrarians more-interested in personal experimentation than in working to make something solid and accessible to a general audience, and not particularly interested in cooperating or otherwise working together. Most of the people who are interested in pragmatic applications are going to just use something already widely used. The lojban community, when I was active in it, had a huge variety of interesting ideas that nobody was ever following up on or implementing, and the big projects people agreed were important (completing a document standardizing a new version of the language) languished. There were pretty regularly complaints about the community infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing list) that were answered with "If you're passionate about this, please feel free to fix it, or take over running it yourself. I want to hand these off and stop being the only responsible person. I'll give you commit access, root access on the servers, etc." that were almost never actually accepted.
So, basically like almost every open-source project out there. ;)