Lojban - The Logical Language | Hacker News Reader

Lojban - The Logical Language

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64 pointsgnosis38 comments

For reference, I became reasonably fluent at reading and writing lojban. I think it's fantastic, but in the end there were few people to communicate with, no decent reading material, and too many other calls on my time.

I have a couple of ideas for web apps to help bootstrap lojban, but again, no time.

Shame, really. I like it.

"I think it's fantastic, but in the end there were few people to communicate with, no decent reading material"

These only really matter if communicating with others and consuming content were your primary goals. If so, obviously a more mainstream language would be preferable.

But there are other things that you could do, such as create Lojban content yourself (ie. write articles, books, poems, etc..), or help others to learn Lojban (increasing the number of people to communicate with), or figure out ways to use Lojban to communicate with computers, or help improve and shape the language.

For several years I tried all those things. I couldn't get anyone interested in learning with me, there wasn't enough material at the right sort of level to get really fluent without years of rewardless work, and when I tried writing anything it tool literally months to write a few paragraphs to a standard that was regarded at the time as acceptable.

Maybe things have changed, but my ideas for generating large amounts of interesting entry-level material were ignored, so I finally gave up. When you work hard to produce material that no one reads, it becomes hard to care.

I have a lot more to say, but despite trying to be helpful, it will probably just come out as complaining, so rather than potentially damage the movement, I'm better leaving the enthusiasts to just get on with it without me.

Have you read Ben Goertzel's Loglish idea to combine the Lojban grammar with the English vocabulary? This could address the issue of adoption. http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm http://www.goertzel.org/papers/lojbanplusplus.pdf

this is good idea. i wonder if there is such adapted texts for other languages. it sure would make learning experience better.

When did these "several years" take place, ColinWright? Was the Web already around? Was it before social media came of age? It's only been a few years since social networking really came on the scene. Maybe nowadays it'd be easier to find or form a community that would support the dreams and meet the desires you had when learning Lojban.

YouTube is particularly significant. Being able to hear and see speakers of a foreign language has got to be a tremendous boon for those interested in learning that language. (Yes, such resources were likely available before YouTube, but only professionally-produced resources, only for popular languages, and not free.)

I started learning Esperanto in 1998, but stopped studying after a few months, since college kept me very busy at the time. (I still remember many words, surprisingly.) Were I to pick up nowadays, though, I'm sure I'd be able find an astounding wealth of resources and people who'd spur me on. I'd expect a similar situation with Lojban (though on a smaller scale, since it's less popular.)

I started in 1988 and only finally gave up in 2006.

Maybe the new social media would help, but in truth, I doubt it. The IRC channels, wiki, email lists and occasional Skype call have existed for ages and still nothing has really changed.

If I had a meter square sheet of paper, divided it into centimeter squares and crossed off one per day, I probably wouldn't get to finish. I'm now not going to spend any of them trying to re-acquire lojban.

ui .i mi batci le mlatu

Same here. If I ever get around to making The Computer Game Of My Dreams, I'm going to have one faction, race or species' dialogue entirely in lojban, with no translations or subtitles.

Did you notice any impact on your clarity of thought?

I did notice a specific change in the complexity of my usage of tenses. My ability to reason didn't seem to change much, but I am a mathematician.

The thread is about Lojban (I remember interacting a lot with one of the main promoters of lojban on Usenet in the 1990s), but since there is also mention of Esperanto in the thread, I'll mention one of the best online resources about Esperanto:

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

I have studied a great variety of natural languages, from several different language families, and made my living for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter or translator. Conlangs are fun hobbies, but they have not enjoyed conspicuous success at solving any of the real-world problems for which they are proposed as solutions.

A good general site about conlangs is

http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

Lojban illustrates perfectly that logic is not the most important feature of a language (since no one wants to, or perhaps even can, learn it to fluency). Arika Okrent deals with this in her (truly excellent) book In The Land Of Invented Languages.

That seems a highly tenuous line of reasoning. There could be any number of other reasons for its lack of adoption so far, mostly involving the lack of other people who speak it.

There was once a lack of other people who spoke Esperanto. Yet it flourished.

There was once a lack of other people who spoke Klingon, and yet it flourished.

There was (at around the turn of the 20th century) a lack of people who spoke Hebrew, and yet it too flourished and now there's a whole nation of people who speak it.

Lack of people who speak the language is always a problem for any artificial language... at first. Some manage to overcome this problem. Others don't. The interesting question is why this is the case, and what can be done about it.

It helps to have, respectively: early 20th century internationalist idealists, geeky star trek fans, or a newly imposed nation needing a ready made myth of identity, as a constituency of early adopters.

Esperanto is so similar to any other romance language it's almost trivial to pick up. I can decode a page of it fairly easily. Klingon had a huge body of enthusiasts.

Lojban has no entry level material that is actually engaging. We need a large number of articles about interesting things, but written at the language level of a four year old. With nothing interesting to read, and no other reason to learn other than "it's interesting" it's having a hard time growing.

It needs entry level interesting material.

Yeah, agreed.

In fact, the strongest headwind Esperanto constantly faces is Spanish. There's already a romance language with absolutely systematic spelling, easy pronunciation, simple grammar, and few irregularities. It's already the second most widely spoken language on the planet, it has mountains of interesting and elementary material, and there are lots of interesting people whom you can meet only by speaking it.

It's hard for any rationalized romance language to gain traction against that.

I may have an Idea: could we try to bootsrap lojban by writing something akin to Guy Steele's growing a language? Or is lojban so orthogonal that expressing most of its words and grammar in terms of a smaller kernel is impossible?

Sure, that would be quite recursive. But you wouldn't read lojban if you weren't interested in it anyway, so it's bound to be interesting.

Klingon flourished? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#cite_ref-0 indicates an estimated 12 speakers.

Fair enough. But my point is that it's premature to say that being logical doesn't matter (much), or especially that it's a point against Lojban's adoption, as the comment implied. Surely there are other reasons.

Being logical may matter... but I don't think it's the most important feature, as I said. Creating a perfectly logical language doesn't make it obviously valuable to most people. The underlying premise of Lojban is, more or less, that the problem with natural languages is that they're too illogical. Lojban fixed that problem and, relatively speaking, no one cared.

Lots of people hear of Esperanto and decide to pick it up. Almost no one hears of Lojban and picks up. Lots of people are fluent in Esperanto. Perhaps no one is fluent in Lojban. Granted Esperanto had a huge head-start, but I don't think you can attribute its relative success entirely to that factor.

Lojban is still missing something, despite being perfectly logical. English, on the other hand, is flourishing despite being extremely illogical. English is one of the most successful and least logical languages on Earth. Lojban is one of the least successful and most logical languages on Earth. "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." - Randall Munroe

All I was trying to say is that being logical is not a panacea.

Hebrew isn't such a great example. The language was still in use as a liturgical language and for reading religious texts, it just wasn't being used (or at least, was barely being used) as a modern spoken language.

I have one gripe with that book- though it dispels some stereotypes, it perpetuates the idea that the primary purpose of conlanging is to fix what's wrong with natural languages, and make better ones. For many conlangs and conlangers, that's simply not true. _In the Land of Invented Languages_ is one of the best publicizations of conlanging, but the world still lacks a good overview of conlangs simply as art or experiment.

What the most important feature of language is depends on the purpose that a particular language serves. It might be better to say that logical disambiguity is not the most important feature required for human communication (although that's much longer to say). On that note, Lojban and loglangs in general have been discussed fairly extensively on the CONLANG mailing list recently; a couple of relevant messages are http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1106A... and http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1105A...

There is some standing disagreement over whether anyone has ever really become fluent in Lojban, or if they just become fluent in a creole-Lojban that merely happens to reproduce a subset of Lojban's surface forms.

I didn't get that feel from the book, but then again, I was pretty familiar with conlanging (is that even the correct word?) when I read it, so that might have biased my judgement.

My impression was that part of her thesis in the book was that there is nothing wrong with natural languages. That what looks wrong is, in fact, part of what makes them work.

"Loglan is fine for syllogism, circuitry, and mathematical calculations, but lacks flavor. Useless for gossip or to whisper into girl's ear." -- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis

(I gather there's some sort of religious issue wrt the difference between Loglan and Lojban, though)

Huh, maybe I will try whispering some Loglan into my wife's ear and see what happens :-)

Also check Eco's The Search for a Perfect Language, it's an excellent resource.

I would have liked to see more explained samples and less philosophy. The draft version of the book digs right in and starts explaining how it works.

http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter...

Once upon a time I translated "The lake island of Innisfree" to Lojban.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/19725

Lack of reading materials is a problem, but I found that I enjoy writing or translating as much as reading.

It just hit me that Eliezer Yudkowsky's Methods of Rationality's Parseltongue bears a resemblance to lojban: its limited vocabulary force its speakers to describe complex concepts with simpler terms, which makes the whole extremely readable.

Is there any resources such as an IRC channel, or chat room to train and use lojban.

Its most definetely a exciting concept, and one which I would consider pursuing.

#lojban on freenode

"How to learn Lojban

Write to The Logical Language Group, Inc., and we will be happy to provide information"

Yup. That's gonna work.

Did you even look at the page? http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Learning

It gets better:

"To get started, you will need to begin reading one or more of the Lojban Books"

Seriously. A Book.

Available online.

I wonder if a project like Andi-Land, or another similar game or even a Zorklike, built around natural language parsing would be the right way to teach a language like Lojban.

edit: Oh, someone's already done Colossal Cave.

I mistakenly assumed this was a programming language; it's actually (for now) a human language.

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