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Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has the "pe

Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has the "per" of English "person" and the ren of Chinese. cukta has the "ook" of English "book", all of Chinese shu(c is pronounced "sh"), and part of Arabic (and Turkish) kitap. vanju is like French vin and Chinese jiu. This makes learning words easier for the largest number of people. I want to physically reach through my monitor and strangle him for writing that. Words in human languages are composed of morphemes, not letters. It's easier to learn words in foreign languages if you know how to dissect a new word into its morphemes so that you can read the meaning of the word. By getting a five letter statistical average over completely different langauges, the morphemes of the original words will not be preserved, and therefore you cannot look at a lojban root word, dissect it into morphemes, and then read what it means. "per" and "pre" are two completely different morphemes in english, the root of "book" is not "ook", it's "bo". "vin" and "van" are two completely different morphemes in French, etc, etc. The lojban words are not similar to their real-language roots in the same way that real words are to each other, instead they're similar based on the mathematical distance between letters, which is completely useless for learning it. You can sort of figure out the above examples after the fact, after you have learnt the words, with the knowledge of what the word is in those eight languages. But given a lojban word you have never seen before, you have no way of knowing what it means, even if you know the word in all those languages.

sfwc 17y ago
I don't think anyone claims that Lojban phonology will help people guess the meaning of its root words. Even if you guess that {klama} means "travel", you probably can't guess that it means precisely (x1 travels to destination x2 from origin x3 via route x4 using conveyance x5). As a native English speaker who's been learning Lojban casually for a few weeks, I find the phonological resemblances helpful mostly as mnemonics - {prenu} is easier to remember for sounding a little like "person", {nitcu} like "need", et cetera. (And remembering the place structures does get easier, there is a fairly consistent rationale to how they are chosen.)
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  No, but the author of the article claimed that you can see "bits of different languages in them", which you can't. Neither morphemes nor phonemes are preserved, only letters. The method for creating these words make it probable that there will be at least one letter in the lojban word in common with the word in the six original languages, but there seems to be no guarantee that the letter or letters in common are from the actual root of the word, which are the important letters of the word. Therefore, the way the root words in Lojban are constructed does not make the learning of words easier for the largest number of people, it just makes it really difficult for everyone. Take your example of "klama". I can see that it shares "l" and "a" with "travel", but how do you construct a mnemonic for remembering it? It shares no morphemes and no phonemes with "travel", and there's no phonological resemblance either, so there's nothing to help you learn it if you are an English speaker, you just have to memorize it as-is. I'm sure there are many other features of Lojban that are interesting, and I'm sure that compound words in Lojban are pretty easy to learn and construct, but the text I quoted from the article about root words shows a complete lack of understanding of how human languages work and grow and evolve.
  - sfwc 17y ago
    It's not instantly clear from e.g. http://www.lojban.org/publications/etymology/etysample.txt http://www.lojban.org/publications/etymology/etysample.txt what the algorithm was for the computerized part of the process of gismu construction, although I doubt it was as naive as you seem to be implying. In any event, the humans involved also played with the gloss words they were feeding it to try and find good compromises. {klama} does not in fact take the "l" and "a" from "travel" - it comes from (in Lojban's phonetic spelling) the English "kam" (come), the Hindi "ana" and the Chinese "lai". At worst, learning Lojban vocabulary is no worse than learning any foreign language, and at best it's somewhat easier (which has been my experience) - I certainly don't see how its phonology "just makes it really difficult for everyone".
    - henrikschroder 17y ago
      Compare it with Esperanto: At best it's really easy because the word you want to learn shares a lot of morphemes with some European language that you know, and at worst there's no similarity to any language you know. If you are Chinese it sucks all the way, but if you are Portuguese or Polish or English you can sort of guess what unknown words in Esperanto means, you can guess, you can wing it. It's biased towards European languages that way, and that is something the article about Lojban pointed out that they wanted to explicitly avoid when creating it. But the result of their statistical average method is that everyone has to look up and memorize every single root word when learning Lojban. It might be easy to memorize them because of the simple spelling and that you know they're all five letters long, and that there might be letters in common with the word in your native language, but you have to do it for each of them. Noone can look at a Lojban word and guess what it means, regardless of your language background. You have no chance at guessing it correctly, you can't wing it, you can't speak pidgin Lojban, you either know the root word for something, or you don't, and if you don't you have to look it up. If the root words had shared morphemes with other languages, then it would have been easier for some people and harder for others, but since it doesn't share with anyone, it's hard for everyone.

sfwc 17y ago

I don't think anyone claims that Lojban phonology will help people guess the meaning of its root words. Even if you guess that {klama} means "travel", you probably can't guess that it means precisely (x1 travels to destination x2 from origin x3 via route x4 using conveyance x5). As a native English speaker who's been learning Lojban casually for a few weeks, I find the phonological resemblances helpful mostly as mnemonics - {prenu} is easier to remember for sounding a little like "person", {nitcu} like "need", et cetera. (And remembering the place structures does get easier, there is a fairly consistent rationale to how they are chosen.)

henrikschroder 17y ago
No, but the author of the article claimed that you can see "bits of different languages in them", which you can't. Neither morphemes nor phonemes are preserved, only letters. The method for creating these words make it probable that there will be at least one letter in the lojban word in common with the word in the six original languages, but there seems to be no guarantee that the letter or letters in common are from the actual root of the word, which are the important letters of the word. Therefore, the way the root words in Lojban are constructed does not make the learning of words easier for the largest number of people, it just makes it really difficult for everyone. Take your example of "klama". I can see that it shares "l" and "a" with "travel", but how do you construct a mnemonic for remembering it? It shares no morphemes and no phonemes with "travel", and there's no phonological resemblance either, so there's nothing to help you learn it if you are an English speaker, you just have to memorize it as-is. I'm sure there are many other features of Lojban that are interesting, and I'm sure that compound words in Lojban are pretty easy to learn and construct, but the text I quoted from the article about root words shows a complete lack of understanding of how human languages work and grow and evolve.
- sfwc 17y ago
  It's not instantly clear from e.g. http://www.lojban.org/publications/etymology/etysample.txt http://www.lojban.org/publications/etymology/etysample.txt what the algorithm was for the computerized part of the process of gismu construction, although I doubt it was as naive as you seem to be implying. In any event, the humans involved also played with the gloss words they were feeding it to try and find good compromises. {klama} does not in fact take the "l" and "a" from "travel" - it comes from (in Lojban's phonetic spelling) the English "kam" (come), the Hindi "ana" and the Chinese "lai". At worst, learning Lojban vocabulary is no worse than learning any foreign language, and at best it's somewhat easier (which has been my experience) - I certainly don't see how its phonology "just makes it really difficult for everyone".
  - henrikschroder 17y ago
    Compare it with Esperanto: At best it's really easy because the word you want to learn shares a lot of morphemes with some European language that you know, and at worst there's no similarity to any language you know. If you are Chinese it sucks all the way, but if you are Portuguese or Polish or English you can sort of guess what unknown words in Esperanto means, you can guess, you can wing it. It's biased towards European languages that way, and that is something the article about Lojban pointed out that they wanted to explicitly avoid when creating it. But the result of their statistical average method is that everyone has to look up and memorize every single root word when learning Lojban. It might be easy to memorize them because of the simple spelling and that you know they're all five letters long, and that there might be letters in common with the word in your native language, but you have to do it for each of them. Noone can look at a Lojban word and guess what it means, regardless of your language background. You have no chance at guessing it correctly, you can't wing it, you can't speak pidgin Lojban, you either know the root word for something, or you don't, and if you don't you have to look it up. If the root words had shared morphemes with other languages, then it would have been easier for some people and harder for others, but since it doesn't share with anyone, it's hard for everyone.