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.
So which one?
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).
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.
Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t10216.htm
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.
Also you need to actually visit China to take advantage of the "extending the number of people you can communicate with" benefit.
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.
http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/poetry.html http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms
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).
Photorealism can be used in abstract art.
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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
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.
> 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.
The PMEG has many chapters: http://bertilow.com/pmeg/detala_enhavo.html
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]?
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?
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 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.
Regarding tenses, qué será, será. :)
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.
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.
Regarding translation, I keep meaning to pick up Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot, which is all about this sort of thing.
Actually Finnish has two: hän for she/he, and se for it. But for example Turkish has only one: o for she/he/it.
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 understand that lots of people actually do think in language, but you shouldn't assume that everyone follows the same mental process.
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.
Language learning
> 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.
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.
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.