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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 th

by 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.

by sfwc 17y ago

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.