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A friend of mine who has a passion for language tried to get me to learn Lojban with him for a while. It's a complete waste of time in terms of its usability. I

by tel 10y ago

A friend of mine who has a passion for language tried to get me to learn Lojban with him for a while. It's a complete waste of time in terms of its usability. I have never even heard of someone other than this friend who has spent any time trying it out. What is interesting about learning a conlang, especially one with such an interest in being unambiguous, is that it aggressively points out how weird language actually is. I'm a native English speaker and the sort of person who just shrugged by all of public school English via the "it sounds good" argument. I really have no conception of what the structure of English is except in my own ability to use it. Learning even just a small amount of Lojban helped connect my ideas of natural language to similar ones in logic and semantics. It did so even more effectively than learning Mandarin has even though I've learned far more Mandarin. I think if you're interested in turning your analytical eye toward your own use of language in order to better understand what does and does not make any sense about it then learning a bit of a conlang is probably a good bet. It's the next best thing to having a linguist friend.

shakna 10y ago
I studied Proto-Indo-European and fit into a similar box. It's entirely useless, day to day. But, because it's not one of the earliest languages, and because it's a reconstruction, it is as simple as it can be. It can make it difficult to express some ideas, like "innovation". But it does allow you to understand the function of grammar, and the way we are limited by the words we have. If you can't express it, then though you may be able to think it, you can never truly convey it to anyone else. You can give endless analogies and stories, but no one can grasp the idea until it becomes a word that they also think. One last analogy of the journey this opened up for me: imagine that the word 'colour' never existed. Describe the Northern Lights.

by tel 10y ago

shakna 10y ago

I studied Proto-Indo-European and fit into a similar box. It's entirely useless, day to day. But, because it's not one of the earliest languages, and because it's a reconstruction, it is as simple as it can be. It can make it difficult to express some ideas, like "innovation". But it does allow you to understand the function of grammar, and the way we are limited by the words we have. If you can't express it, then though you may be able to think it, you can never truly convey it to anyone else. You can give endless analogies and stories, but no one can grasp the idea until it becomes a word that they also think. One last analogy of the journey this opened up for me: imagine that the word 'colour' never existed. Describe the Northern Lights.