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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 voc

by 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.

by gecko 11y ago

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.