Lojban

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.

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.

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)

[1] http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2013/coinheist.com/rubik/lojicomi...

* 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."

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.

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.

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

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...

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).

Site: http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/

Book: http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/Angos+Grammar

Did You Know... Lojban's regular enough that there's a yacc grammar for it? http://www.lojban.org/publications/formal-grammars/grammar.3...

That doesn't change my opinion though, that it doesn't matter much with which you start.

> 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.

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.

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.