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> In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother").

Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother.

i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.

"Patrulo" would also work.

"Ino" and "ulo" are practically redundant, which makes it (I think) the easiest way to sneak in a masculating affix.

"vir-" is a preëxisting masculating prefix. I would read patrulo as "A fatherly person", rather than a parent, as "-ul-" turns an adjective into a person embodying that adjective.

(ge- is the neuterizing prefix, but in my extremely limited dabbling, it's mostly seen in plurals: gepatroj for parents, but for a single parent, one generally says patro for father and patrino for mother.)

Like some other languages, one of the two is both specifically male in some contexts, and generic in others (which is why vir- exists, to clear up confusion in otherwise-generic contexts). English even retains some irregular words of this sort, such as dog vs. bitch, where dog is male in contexts where gender matters, but bitch is female in all contexts (at least when it comes to dogs).

Only one gender can get the shorter prefix, and there are only so many vowels (many people say that Esperanto already has too many vowels). Real surviving cultures aren't so petty that they'd make all their words longer by two characters for the sake of "fairness".

As for -in* being two extra characters for explicit-feminine, it's just something you trade for regular conjugation with such restricted phonotactics.

Now, you could make the argument to ditch grammatical gender altogether, and I'd probably be on board with that. In most cases it does not shorten or clarify sentences.

Wouldn't adding an extra syllable to a large subset of words indeed be a language problem?

That‘s not sexism though.

Male-by-default isn't sexism? What do you mean by sexism?

Thank you for the quick overview. I also got interested in Lojban. I am trying to incorporate the learning of the language in to some of my routines.

For example, for software projects, where I can, I use Lojban named classes, functions, test strings (instead of 'lorem ... '), and even comments.

There are some youtube clips of songs in Lojban, I played them for my family and, unfortunately, response was negative (music was not that nice, and it sounds harsh as you noted).

I think Lojban might have an interesting future as requirements specification and STEM-papers language. Because it is purposefully unambiguous to interpret. May be like a modern day Latin, or something...

Lojban is actually equivalent to first-order predicate logic, I believe!

for instance, "lo cmalu noltru (ku)" is equivalent to "there exists some X, such that X satisfies the predicate 'cmalu noltru', i.e. X is a small type-of prince."

unlike Esperanto however, lojban isn't likely to be teachable to children, or fluently speakable. all words in natural human languages seem to have a maximum of three 'arguments', i.e. parts of speech that valsi bind to. words in lojban may have up to five arguments, so it's unclear whether human brains can accommodate that many slots.

additionally, while lojban is LL-parsable, machines like Parsey McParseFace can now accurately parse human universal grammar. unambiguous parsing was a big feature of lojban, so it's lost a major selling point.

but! learning exotic languages is good for the brain, so it's a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor. I speak a conlang with only 2 speakers, and it has enriched my life, so tilt at those windmills! :)

I don't know very much Lojban but (while I agree that the grammar is meant to be a realization of a formal logic), I'm a bit unsure of your specific example with "lo cmalu noltru":

First, I think "lo cmalu noltru" is a sumti (akin to a noun phrase) and not a complete sentence by itself.

Second, I'm not positive about the existential import of "lo". There are many reasons for this, but to take a kind of extreme example, the reform of the meaning of le and lo at https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_gadri#cmavo:_lo_.2... presents the example

lo pavyseljirna cu ranmi danlu gi'e simlu lo ka ge ce'u xirma gi lo pa jirna cu cpana lo mebri be ce'u

'Unicorns are mythical creatures that look like a horse with a horn coming out of their foreheads.'

This doesn't seem to imply that there exists X such that X satisfies the predicate pavyseljirna. Or to take another example, presumably Lojban can express using "lo" the notion that "Counterexamples to Fermat's Last Theorem were never discovered prior to 1993, despite extensive computer searches".

I do think that many Lojban utterances have formal existential import in many cases, and I don't know enough about Lojban to try to describe which ones. :-) (I seem to remember something about a bare gismu implying that the predicate is at some occasion true of something, like "tavli" by itself without arguments meaning something like 'speaking, it's a thing that happens at some point!'. But given the example of talking about unicorns, maybe even this is too strong somehow.)

Edit: ... by the way, what's the conlang with two speakers that you speak?

I don't know any Lojban at all, but I do know formal logic and "there exists" (∃) is usually used to denote existence with respect to some universe of discourse, and not necessarily physical existence. Most mathematical concepts only exist as things that mathematicians talk about, not unlike Unicorns. However, I would read the example sentence as making a statement about all unicorns, of the form "∀ U ∈ Unicorns . U ∈ MythicalCreatures ∧ (∃ H ∈ Horses . looks-like(U, H)) ∧ ∃ H ∈ Horns . (has(U, H) ∧ ∃F ∈ Foreheads . (has(U, F) ∧ coming-out-of(H, F)))" or something to that effect.

The sentence about counterexamples to Fermat's last theorem could be written using an existential quantifier without problem, since it appears in a negated sentence, thus not actually claiming their existence, rather the nonexistence of counterexamples discovered prior to 1993.

However, looking at the definition you linked, it appears that "lo" does not have any specific equivalent in formal logic since "It converts a selbri, selecting its first argument, into a sumti. The resulting expression refers generically to any or some individual or individuals that fit as the first argument of the selbri." which seems to be mostly a grammatical function?

The meaning of "lo" was changed from the original existential meaning to its current grammatical meaning under the recent "xorlo" change, I believe.

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/How_to_use_xorlo

Thanks for the useful discussion on this point.

> machines like Parsey McParseFace can now accurately parse human universal grammar. unambiguous parsing was a big feature of lojban, so it's lost a major selling point.

Slow down there ... Most linguists (or a substantial minority) do not subscribe to the theoretical idea of universal grammar. Parsey McParseFace is only an incremental improvement in decades of statistical parsing. The problem of natural language understanding remains largely unsolved. Like other deep learning models, it is not hard to come up with adversarial examples that will confuse the parser but not any competent human language user. The parser is only as good as the data it is trained on; this data is expensive to acquire but there is never enough. Additionally there are a myriad other kinds of ambiguity in language beyond the sentence-level syntactic ambiguity which is resolved by a statistical parser such as Parsey McParseFace.

In my opinion Lojban provides a good illustration of just how hard it is to remove ambiguity from human language.

There are fluent speakers of Lojban as can be seen in Lojban groups on Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/BLVsYz20Boixl0xN-0TrPw and https://t.me/joinchat/BLVsYz3hCF8mCAb6fzW1Rw

> Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.

Esperanto is still very easy to learn for Asians, at least more than natural languages. Some of its largest support comes from China, including being taught in grade school, giving university degrees and Radio Peking broadcasts since 1964¹.

On top of that, the premise that Esperanto belongs to the western family is not accurate. "Esperanto is basically an isolating language".²

[1] http://esperanto.cri.cn/2521/2017/12/27/172s196652.htm

[2] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...

For those that found this comment intriguing I'd recommend the book "In the land of invented languages". It covers a number of conlangs. Lojban seems quite interesting, I've been meaning to start learning it as well as exploring it as adapting it into a programming language that can be spoken and used to convey general ideas.

Toki pona is fun. I was trying to get my partner to learn it so we could have an obscure way to communicate simple things. Depending on the company switching to spanish (although our proficiency is pretty low) is sometimes effective.

I'd love to keep abreast of interesting conlangs, are there any communities you'd recommend?

Hm while "In the land of invented languages" was a fun read, I found the book to be overly Western natlang focused (I know many more natlangs than I do conlangs, but a lot of my natlangs come from different language families, so I am aware of the large conceptual gap between languages).

As far as keeping abreast conlangs, there's reddit's r/conlangs that's a lot of fun. Lojban and Toki Pona are very popular there.

The fact that Esperanto is more difficult to learn for non-europeans can also be seen as a feature. It enables the use of Esperanto as an introductory European language. There is pretty good evidence that spending a year learning Esperanto before learning, say, English, leads to better English skills than spending an extra year on English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

I wouldn't call that evidence "pretty good." What you'd want to see is a comparison of X years of Esperanto then Y years of English versus X years of <another language> then Y years of English (or perhaps X+Y years of English), with both comparison groups controlled for lingual capabilities of the main conversation cohort (friends and family) as well as incentive to learn languages (English can notoriously be the lazy option).

If you want to claim that Esperanto is easier to learn than, say, English, I would not dispute that. Although I would point out that some of that ease comes from its artificiality--learning about culture is a major component of foreign language courses (particularly in scholastic environments), and Esperanto basically lacks culture.

Here's a review of one of the studies in the Wikipedia article I wrote some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019

It appears that a certain jcranmer was also in that thread. Hi!

To summarize: low sample size, confounding factors and mixed results mean that there's no strong evidence to suggest learning Esperanto helps more with learning another foreign language than directly starting to learn that language.

That's really interesting. You should probably incorporate your findings in the Wikipedia article. It definitely lacks a critical viewpoint!

It's difficult to incorporate because it would basically be original research that's a metareview of published articles. Of course, the article itself is basically a metareview of primary source articles, which itself is a no-no on Wikipedia, but at least the fact that it is such basically screams that it's biased and non-NPOV.

Thanks for the note on Toki Pona, my son is learning other languages, and I dabbled in quite a few over the years, and this looks like fun to just play around with. :)

Another translated work: Adventure

http://ifiction.org/games/playz.php?cat=1&game=378&mode=html

Edit: Say, shouldn't there be an Esperanto translation?

Would you mind giving some links to those Toki Pona Telegram groups? I've wanted to learn for a while, and talking with people seems like a good way to do that.

Sure. Join https://telegram.me/joinchat/BLVsYz92zHUp2h2TYp9kTA for some Toki Pona chat!

"Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds."

Harder than what? At least the grammar, pronunciation, and word-building are very regular. Almost any national language will be harder than Esperanto.

I have always found Toki Pona incredibly creepy. It's like someone read about Newspeak in 1984 and decided "yes, that sounds great, let's do exactly this" unironically.

Sure, and Newspeak itself is based on a misguided belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguists have disproved Sapir-Whorf for the most part.

They've disproved the strong Sapir-Whorf. At least according to Wikipedia there's some evidence for the the so-called weak version.

In any event, languages at the extreme ends of the spectrum, like Toki Pona and Ithkuil, seem to show rather clearly how language can shape thought. Here's a fascinating point from an The Atlantic article, linked from the Toki Pona website:

   One student of the language [Ithkuil] claimed that it
   allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names,
   in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed
   gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be
   discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange
   new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could
   wander forever through an endless landscape of unique
   thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive.

   -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/

Perhaps a better, more obvious example is simply the languages of mathematics. There are many concepts that simply cannot be expressed with any substantial accuracy in vernacular language. No amount of metaphor suffices to convey quantum mechanical concepts in a useful, utilitarian way. Heck, didn't Richard Feynman literally invent a new language, Feynman Diagrams, to teach quantum mechanics? (I understand that mathematical languages are perhaps better described as notation, but notation doesn't convey the fact that the concepts often can't be translated into the vernacular.)

I'd argue that a corollary of Sapir-Whorf is that no language can express every possible concept. That, I think, is a far more agreeable claim.