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Can anyone versed in Loglan with some familiarity with Esperanto give me the benefits Loglan has over Esperanto? It seems more complex in grammar with more dif

by Nadya 11y ago

Can anyone versed in Loglan with some familiarity with Esperanto give me the benefits Loglan has over Esperanto? It seems more complex in grammar with more difficult consonant clusters, at a glance.

gecko 11y ago
They have nothing in common except being a language. Esperanto is an indo-European conlang designed to be as easy to learn as possible. As such, it borrows vocabulary from as many languages as possible--which, due to when it was made, really means "as many languages in western Europe as possible, plus Polish and Greek"--and has a deliberately simple, minimalist (by spoken language standards) grammar. Loglan, like the more famous Lojban that's inspired by it, attempts to make it possible to speak in a completely unambiguous way. It makes no attempt to be easy to learn and is not designed for casual conversation, although people certainly try. I have no idea why you would learn Loglan over Lojban, since the former has had a couple of copyright feuds with people trying to follow the language and has a much smaller community.
- housel 11y ago
  The copyright feuds belong to an earlier era, when the original Lojban founders forked the language. Things are a lot more open now, and there is a degree of cooperation between the two conlang projects. Loglan does make an attempt to be easy to learn in that its basic vocabulary words are inspired by words from eight of the world's most-spoken languages. For example "blanu" comes from English "blue", German "blau", and Chinese "藍lan".
  - schoen 11y ago
    I think Lojban also subsequently ran some software to produce some kind of similarity score for creating vocabulary similar to the most-spoken languages. For example https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bangu#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bangu#Etymology I don't know whether the original Loglan project to do this relied only on human creativity or also on software (and whether Lojban used a human editorial step after the software step). https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gismu_etymology https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gismu_etymology http://www.lojban.org/old-style/publications/etymology.html http://www.lojban.org/old-style/publications/etymology.html
    - DougMerritt 11y ago
      > I don't know whether the original Loglan project to do this relied only on human creativity or also on software (and whether Lojban used a human editorial step after the software step). I no longer recall whether Loglan used software for its derivations, but it hardly matters -- both Loglan and Lojban had very similar goals and methods here (although naturally Lojban always tried to improve on the forerunner, Loglan). I encouraged Lojban to normalize to something that could be handled by yacc(1). That turned out to be complicated, although I recall that that goal was at least nominally met.
- chrisfosterelli 11y ago
  Esperanto definitely has indo-european origins, however it's worth pointing out that native speakers of asian languages still find it drastically easier to learn compared to, for example, English. China, in particular, holds a very notable percentage of the Esperanto community. Esperanto's vocabulary doesn't do them any favours, but the grammar and syntax is relatively easier for them to pick up than most western languages. The vocabulary itself is very small and easy to memorize, since most words are based on combining words.
WorldMaker 11y ago
I studied Lojban (http://lojban.org http://lojban.org) a bit out of curiosity many years back (in High School in a deep CONLANG phase), which is a fork of Loglan. I'll speak from the point of view of Lojban, as I know it better, but the fork doesn't fall far from the root so it should all mostly apply to Loglan as well. Essentially, Lojban and Esperanto come from different intentions: Esperanto wanted to be a common tongue that speakers of various natural languages could learn relatively easily and use for multicultural communications. Loglan and Lojban were started as experimentation around the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language influences mental structure. The goal of these languages was then to see if people used a language with more formal mathematical rigidity/"logic" to it might more easily "think" as better mathematicians. The jury is still out, of course, on whether any of these languages actually do what they set out to do. Essentially, the concept of Lojban/Loglan is kind of a "What if people actually spoke a natural language that was very similar to a programming language?" (Loglan actually predates most programming languages, and Lojban incorporated some things from programming languages over time.) From that respect, the grammar of Lojban is stringently less complex than most natural grammars (and Esperanto). There's an official PEG [Parsing Expression Grammar] specification of Lojban these days and Lojban has worked very hard to keep the language grammar Context-Free (in the Chomsky's Hierarchy/Computational Parsing sense). The language's grammar is much more like a programming language than a natural language. As for the consonant clusters, even the morphology of the words follows a fairly strict parsing pattern. For the most part when reading Lojban/Loglan you only need to pronounce three letters at a time. (This is part of the play in the name LOGical LANguage of the three letter syllable pattern in the language itself. Lojban uses the language's own symbols in its case.) Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? Ultimately I think it's a matter of whether or not there is a benefit of Apples over Oranges: it's more a matter of your particular taste and what you want out of a conlang. They are all beautiful languages trying to do interesting things.
- DougMerritt 11y ago
  > Loglan actually predates most programming languages Indeed the Scientific American mention of Loglan was 1960 -- after the invention of Cobol, Fortran, and Lisp (and 50's crud like autocoder), but before most everything else. Probably most hear of it for the first time from its prominent mention in Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", where it is the "language" used to program the strong AI that is a major character. I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons). > Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? I am no longer so sure that the case is any different for conlangs than for natural languages. If I ask if there's a benefit of French versus Mandarin, people will chime in with their personal favorites and rationalizations for why one is better than the other, but objectively they are both very fine languages for literature and poetry.

by Nadya 11y ago

Can anyone versed in Loglan with some familiarity with Esperanto give me the benefits Loglan has over Esperanto? It seems more complex in grammar with more difficult consonant clusters, at a glance.

gecko 11y ago

They have nothing in common except being a language. Esperanto is an indo-European conlang designed to be as easy to learn as possible. As such, it borrows vocabulary from as many languages as possible--which, due to when it was made, really means "as many languages in western Europe as possible, plus Polish and Greek"--and has a deliberately simple, minimalist (by spoken language standards) grammar. Loglan, like the more famous Lojban that's inspired by it, attempts to make it possible to speak in a completely unambiguous way. It makes no attempt to be easy to learn and is not designed for casual conversation, although people certainly try. I have no idea why you would learn Loglan over Lojban, since the former has had a couple of copyright feuds with people trying to follow the language and has a much smaller community.

housel 11y ago
The copyright feuds belong to an earlier era, when the original Lojban founders forked the language. Things are a lot more open now, and there is a degree of cooperation between the two conlang projects. Loglan does make an attempt to be easy to learn in that its basic vocabulary words are inspired by words from eight of the world's most-spoken languages. For example "blanu" comes from English "blue", German "blau", and Chinese "藍lan".
- schoen 11y ago
  I think Lojban also subsequently ran some software to produce some kind of similarity score for creating vocabulary similar to the most-spoken languages. For example https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bangu#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bangu#Etymology I don't know whether the original Loglan project to do this relied only on human creativity or also on software (and whether Lojban used a human editorial step after the software step). https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gismu_etymology https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gismu_etymology http://www.lojban.org/old-style/publications/etymology.html http://www.lojban.org/old-style/publications/etymology.html
  - DougMerritt 11y ago
    > I don't know whether the original Loglan project to do this relied only on human creativity or also on software (and whether Lojban used a human editorial step after the software step). I no longer recall whether Loglan used software for its derivations, but it hardly matters -- both Loglan and Lojban had very similar goals and methods here (although naturally Lojban always tried to improve on the forerunner, Loglan). I encouraged Lojban to normalize to something that could be handled by yacc(1). That turned out to be complicated, although I recall that that goal was at least nominally met.
chrisfosterelli 11y ago
Esperanto definitely has indo-european origins, however it's worth pointing out that native speakers of asian languages still find it drastically easier to learn compared to, for example, English. China, in particular, holds a very notable percentage of the Esperanto community. Esperanto's vocabulary doesn't do them any favours, but the grammar and syntax is relatively easier for them to pick up than most western languages. The vocabulary itself is very small and easy to memorize, since most words are based on combining words.

WorldMaker 11y ago

I studied Lojban (http://lojban.org http://lojban.org) a bit out of curiosity many years back (in High School in a deep CONLANG phase), which is a fork of Loglan. I'll speak from the point of view of Lojban, as I know it better, but the fork doesn't fall far from the root so it should all mostly apply to Loglan as well. Essentially, Lojban and Esperanto come from different intentions: Esperanto wanted to be a common tongue that speakers of various natural languages could learn relatively easily and use for multicultural communications. Loglan and Lojban were started as experimentation around the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language influences mental structure. The goal of these languages was then to see if people used a language with more formal mathematical rigidity/"logic" to it might more easily "think" as better mathematicians. The jury is still out, of course, on whether any of these languages actually do what they set out to do. Essentially, the concept of Lojban/Loglan is kind of a "What if people actually spoke a natural language that was very similar to a programming language?" (Loglan actually predates most programming languages, and Lojban incorporated some things from programming languages over time.) From that respect, the grammar of Lojban is stringently less complex than most natural grammars (and Esperanto). There's an official PEG [Parsing Expression Grammar] specification of Lojban these days and Lojban has worked very hard to keep the language grammar Context-Free (in the Chomsky's Hierarchy/Computational Parsing sense). The language's grammar is much more like a programming language than a natural language. As for the consonant clusters, even the morphology of the words follows a fairly strict parsing pattern. For the most part when reading Lojban/Loglan you only need to pronounce three letters at a time. (This is part of the play in the name LOGical LANguage of the three letter syllable pattern in the language itself. Lojban uses the language's own symbols in its case.) Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? Ultimately I think it's a matter of whether or not there is a benefit of Apples over Oranges: it's more a matter of your particular taste and what you want out of a conlang. They are all beautiful languages trying to do interesting things.

DougMerritt 11y ago
> Loglan actually predates most programming languages Indeed the Scientific American mention of Loglan was 1960 -- after the invention of Cobol, Fortran, and Lisp (and 50's crud like autocoder), but before most everything else. Probably most hear of it for the first time from its prominent mention in Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", where it is the "language" used to program the strong AI that is a major character. I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons). > Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? I am no longer so sure that the case is any different for conlangs than for natural languages. If I ask if there's a benefit of French versus Mandarin, people will chime in with their personal favorites and rationalizations for why one is better than the other, but objectively they are both very fine languages for literature and poetry.