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What they don't tell you is that Lojban is so complicated no one can speak it. Go to the forums and pick almost any thread that contains Lojban, and you'll find

What they don't tell you is that Lojban is so complicated no one can speak it. Go to the forums and pick almost any thread that contains Lojban, and you'll find debating about the language. If the supporters can't even speak it right, what hope if there for those who just want to communicate?

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
My experience suggests that there are a handful of people who can read, write and speak the language fairly well, using it, when they choose, as their primary means of communication. Most of the discussion falls into two types. The first type is when a newbie tries to transliterate into lojban, and often says something they don't mean. This is common with anyone learning another language, it's just that in lojban one can be much more precise about what was wrong, because there's a formal grammar. Common confusions are mixing "verbs" with "nouns", neither of which have an exact matching concept in lojban, hence for some it's tough to get a grip on what's going on. The second is debating the semantics. What does this word, explicitly created for lojban, actually mean? What's the difference between a pot and a jar? How, in English, do we decide which word to use? What is the defining characteristic of each? These are often held up as criticisms of the language, but I think unfairly so. They provoke debates in epistomolgy, semantics and pragmatics, and touch on many of the questions that will need to be answered by the machine translation, semantic web and artifical intelligence challenges. And what's the point in learning a language that's just a re-coding of your native language? The other undeniable short-coming is that there is no underlying "culture." Much of the interest in learning, say, Russian, comes from the cultural insights. There is none of that in lojban. Lojban isn't ready for generic, general purpose communication. It's still growing. If all you want is a tool, don't go there. If you want mind-expanding concepts and debate, have a look.
- frig 17y ago
  Can you give a slightly non-trivial lojban sentence with translation? I'd prefer it be one you create so I can more easily ask you questions about it (as opposed to a web example).
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    How complex is "slightly non-trivial" ? Hmm. Here's a recent example: le se viska be mi cu xamgu Translation: The thing(s) I (or we) see is/are/were/will be good. Probably from context, more colloquially: What I see is good. Be advised: not only am I not an expert, I class as a newbie with dangerous knowledge. I have read, understood and worked with the formal machine grammar, and I have written some tools to work with parsed utterances. I have not, and probably never will, have any command of the vocabulary. I'm happy to try to answer questions, and will defer those that are beyond me to one of the lists on which I lurk.
    - frig 17y ago
      Thanks for the sentence, that's certainly nontrivial enough (I was just trying to dodge 2-3-word-sentences like "jesus wept" or "i like milk", which rarely show anything interesting at the grammatical level). Not-mocking: there's an apparent lack of number ("thing(s)", "I (or we)"). Is it closer to true that: - the grammatical root of this apparent lack of # is shared between "thing(s)" and "i (or we)" ...or that: - "thing(s)" is a gloss of some word that's ~ "specific things not specifically specified" - "I (or we)" is a gloss of some word that's ~ "who I speak for" (or some other deictic term that's ~ first-person but otherwise underspecified) ...or to some other possibility? Additionally: Given that it's a designed language I'm curious about what underlying intent (whatever it is that explains why the answer is what it is, instead of being something else). (Disclaimer: wiki's lojban articles have resolved a lot of my other questions, but before I asked you I'd only looked at lojban's wiki's articles, which are mostly unhelpful.)
      - dbrock 17y ago
        Short answer: the latter is more true. The reason why {mi} is unmarked for number is simply that it’s defined that way. In Lojban, everything is unmarked for number by default. It’s actually quite rare to see things explicitly marked for number, as it’s usually either irrelevant or obvious from context. The pronoun {mi} is technically unmarked for number, but is restricted to refer to people that the speaker represents, just as you guessed. For example, it would usually be weird or incorrect to use {mi} to mean “we” in the sense of “me and you”, since representing the very people you are talking to is a rare situation — although theoretically you could come up with examples where it would make sense. So in practice {mi} is usually singular. On the other hand, {do} (which means “you”) is as often plural as it is singular. There are other pronouns that mean “me and you”, “me and others”, “you and others”, and “me, you, and others” — respectively, {mi’o}, {mi’a}, {do’o} and {ma’a} — which is another reason why the need for plural {mi} seldom arises.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  First of all, let me get something out of the way. There are no languages that are just re-coding of other languages. I understand the idea behind Lojban but you've already conceded my point. Lojban is not a suitable language for communication.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    > There are no languages that are just re-coding > of other languages. That's true, but it's "less true" of Italian/Spanish or Russian/Bulgarian than it is of, say, Russian/Swedish. I suspect that we are in complete agreement, and might argue only about precision of expression in our opinions. And I didn't say lojban is unsuitable for communication. There are a few people who use it exclusively when communicating with each other. It is not yet ready for generic, general-purpose communication, just as the newest computer programming language isn't ready for mainstream use by those not interesting in the language so much as getting things done. But again, I suspect we are/would be in "violent agreement" about most of these points. I contend that lojban is, regardless, mind-expandingly interesting. For some.
  - arran4 17y ago
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 As long as the languages are relatively similar and you don't push it too hard.
- dbrock 17y ago
  There are many people who can converse fairly well in real-time written Lojban (although vocabulary is limited, and some parts of the language are generally not used). Due to audio-visual isomorphism, being able to converse in written Lojban almost implies being able (theoretically) to converse in spoken Lojban. However, people are generally much less used to speaking and hearing Lojban, so spoken conversations are usually somewhat difficult (definitely far from fluent).
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    Right. It's been around since 1955 (in spirit at least, in the form of Loglan) and the best anyone can muster is to converse "fairly well" in "real-time" but not in spoken conversation. In other words, it's a language no one can speak. Klingon speakers are even more fluent than Lojban speakers. I'm not trying to say Lojban is stupid. It's not. It's cool. It fills an interesting niche in the language world. However, I'm not convinced it's speakable. Remember the quote by Kernighan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." I would argue that speaking a language is at least twice as hard as inventing it or writing it in a non-real-time fashion, so if you create the most complicated language you can still manage to write (however laboriously), you are by definition not smart enough to speak it. Lojban is that language.
    - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
      Lojban is not designed to be complicated. The important parts of the BNF grammar are about a page, and easily understood in an hour or so of properly directed study. The hard parts are the vocabulary and the mind-set. It is specifically designed to be different, but even then, there are sufficient similarities that it doesn't have to feel completely alien. Some people present it as such because they think it will attract people, but I know that sometimes familiarity is a better draw. It can be presented either way. And people tend to say uncomplicated things in Klingon, whereas most lojban speakers are exploring saying very complicated things - you're not comparing like with like. Further, although gatherings of Klingon speakers are fairly common - piggy-backing on Star Trek conventions - gatherings of lojban speakers are rare. Even so, there are several people who speak it fairly fluently, and the number is growing (in some sense). It is often criticised (I'm not saying you are doing so) for being something other than what people think it "ought" to be. This is a marketing issue. I think it's interesting, and, like learning Lisp, it has expanded my mind in interesting ways.
dbrock 17y ago
Go to #lojban on irc.freenode.net if you want to see Lojban conversation in action.
djanatyn 17y ago
As a speaker of lojban, I have to speak out. Lojban is not Ithkuil. Lojban isn't that complicated to speak, and most of the times on the forums, people are debating better ways to express sentences, not just because they're incorrect. Also, part of the lojbanic culture is to nag people if their grammar is incorrect. In English, most of the time, people may cringe or roll their eyes if they see someone saying something incorrectly, but it's considered polite in Lojban to correct someone's grammar. We also have a lot of beginners and new learners, so don't be too hard on them - they're just learning. There's a common misconception that logical = complicated, which is entirely not true. Lojban is in many places much simpler than English, and makes a lot more sense. I'll admit, there are a couple things which are more complicated, but lojban was built to be spoken by humans, and you don't have to be a genius to speak it. In short, it's logical - but not complicated!
Matt_Arnold 17y ago
DanielStraight, Consider a reasonably-popular, useful software package. At first, one might just toy around with it without sufficiently reading the documentation. Before long, one will learn to use it correctly, but not before getting a lot of error messages. That does not mean the software is impossible to use. Lojban is similar, except that the only place you get error messages in Lojban is from other users. What you are seeing is a symptom of how active the Lojban community is, especially since being featured in an xkcd comic. Many newbies are attempting it before learning it. You are seeing a process of welcoming and educating newcomers that has become the norm in our community. Consider the hypothetical software package again. You may wish to do something weird with it that is at the edges of its scope. You may need to make a feature request, or report flaky performance at a level for which the software is rarely used. That is what you are seeing as well. Our debugging committee, the BPFK, is hashing out a lot of edge cases. However, these edge cases are tangential to the day-to-day usage of almost anyone, which is bug-free. -Matt Arnold, President, Logical Language Group

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

My experience suggests that there are a handful of people who can read, write and speak the language fairly well, using it, when they choose, as their primary means of communication. Most of the discussion falls into two types. The first type is when a newbie tries to transliterate into lojban, and often says something they don't mean. This is common with anyone learning another language, it's just that in lojban one can be much more precise about what was wrong, because there's a formal grammar. Common confusions are mixing "verbs" with "nouns", neither of which have an exact matching concept in lojban, hence for some it's tough to get a grip on what's going on. The second is debating the semantics. What does this word, explicitly created for lojban, actually mean? What's the difference between a pot and a jar? How, in English, do we decide which word to use? What is the defining characteristic of each? These are often held up as criticisms of the language, but I think unfairly so. They provoke debates in epistomolgy, semantics and pragmatics, and touch on many of the questions that will need to be answered by the machine translation, semantic web and artifical intelligence challenges. And what's the point in learning a language that's just a re-coding of your native language? The other undeniable short-coming is that there is no underlying "culture." Much of the interest in learning, say, Russian, comes from the cultural insights. There is none of that in lojban. Lojban isn't ready for generic, general purpose communication. It's still growing. If all you want is a tool, don't go there. If you want mind-expanding concepts and debate, have a look.

frig 17y ago
Can you give a slightly non-trivial lojban sentence with translation? I'd prefer it be one you create so I can more easily ask you questions about it (as opposed to a web example).
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  How complex is "slightly non-trivial" ? Hmm. Here's a recent example: le se viska be mi cu xamgu Translation: The thing(s) I (or we) see is/are/were/will be good. Probably from context, more colloquially: What I see is good. Be advised: not only am I not an expert, I class as a newbie with dangerous knowledge. I have read, understood and worked with the formal machine grammar, and I have written some tools to work with parsed utterances. I have not, and probably never will, have any command of the vocabulary. I'm happy to try to answer questions, and will defer those that are beyond me to one of the lists on which I lurk.
  - frig 17y ago
    Thanks for the sentence, that's certainly nontrivial enough (I was just trying to dodge 2-3-word-sentences like "jesus wept" or "i like milk", which rarely show anything interesting at the grammatical level). Not-mocking: there's an apparent lack of number ("thing(s)", "I (or we)"). Is it closer to true that: - the grammatical root of this apparent lack of # is shared between "thing(s)" and "i (or we)" ...or that: - "thing(s)" is a gloss of some word that's ~ "specific things not specifically specified" - "I (or we)" is a gloss of some word that's ~ "who I speak for" (or some other deictic term that's ~ first-person but otherwise underspecified) ...or to some other possibility? Additionally: Given that it's a designed language I'm curious about what underlying intent (whatever it is that explains why the answer is what it is, instead of being something else). (Disclaimer: wiki's lojban articles have resolved a lot of my other questions, but before I asked you I'd only looked at lojban's wiki's articles, which are mostly unhelpful.)
    - dbrock 17y ago
      Short answer: the latter is more true. The reason why {mi} is unmarked for number is simply that it’s defined that way. In Lojban, everything is unmarked for number by default. It’s actually quite rare to see things explicitly marked for number, as it’s usually either irrelevant or obvious from context. The pronoun {mi} is technically unmarked for number, but is restricted to refer to people that the speaker represents, just as you guessed. For example, it would usually be weird or incorrect to use {mi} to mean “we” in the sense of “me and you”, since representing the very people you are talking to is a rare situation — although theoretically you could come up with examples where it would make sense. So in practice {mi} is usually singular. On the other hand, {do} (which means “you”) is as often plural as it is singular. There are other pronouns that mean “me and you”, “me and others”, “you and others”, and “me, you, and others” — respectively, {mi’o}, {mi’a}, {do’o} and {ma’a} — which is another reason why the need for plural {mi} seldom arises.
DanielStraight 17y ago
First of all, let me get something out of the way. There are no languages that are just re-coding of other languages. I understand the idea behind Lojban but you've already conceded my point. Lojban is not a suitable language for communication.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  > There are no languages that are just re-coding > of other languages. That's true, but it's "less true" of Italian/Spanish or Russian/Bulgarian than it is of, say, Russian/Swedish. I suspect that we are in complete agreement, and might argue only about precision of expression in our opinions. And I didn't say lojban is unsuitable for communication. There are a few people who use it exclusively when communicating with each other. It is not yet ready for generic, general-purpose communication, just as the newest computer programming language isn't ready for mainstream use by those not interesting in the language so much as getting things done. But again, I suspect we are/would be in "violent agreement" about most of these points. I contend that lojban is, regardless, mind-expandingly interesting. For some.
- arran4 17y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 As long as the languages are relatively similar and you don't push it too hard.
dbrock 17y ago
There are many people who can converse fairly well in real-time written Lojban (although vocabulary is limited, and some parts of the language are generally not used). Due to audio-visual isomorphism, being able to converse in written Lojban almost implies being able (theoretically) to converse in spoken Lojban. However, people are generally much less used to speaking and hearing Lojban, so spoken conversations are usually somewhat difficult (definitely far from fluent).
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  Right. It's been around since 1955 (in spirit at least, in the form of Loglan) and the best anyone can muster is to converse "fairly well" in "real-time" but not in spoken conversation. In other words, it's a language no one can speak. Klingon speakers are even more fluent than Lojban speakers. I'm not trying to say Lojban is stupid. It's not. It's cool. It fills an interesting niche in the language world. However, I'm not convinced it's speakable. Remember the quote by Kernighan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." I would argue that speaking a language is at least twice as hard as inventing it or writing it in a non-real-time fashion, so if you create the most complicated language you can still manage to write (however laboriously), you are by definition not smart enough to speak it. Lojban is that language.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    Lojban is not designed to be complicated. The important parts of the BNF grammar are about a page, and easily understood in an hour or so of properly directed study. The hard parts are the vocabulary and the mind-set. It is specifically designed to be different, but even then, there are sufficient similarities that it doesn't have to feel completely alien. Some people present it as such because they think it will attract people, but I know that sometimes familiarity is a better draw. It can be presented either way. And people tend to say uncomplicated things in Klingon, whereas most lojban speakers are exploring saying very complicated things - you're not comparing like with like. Further, although gatherings of Klingon speakers are fairly common - piggy-backing on Star Trek conventions - gatherings of lojban speakers are rare. Even so, there are several people who speak it fairly fluently, and the number is growing (in some sense). It is often criticised (I'm not saying you are doing so) for being something other than what people think it "ought" to be. This is a marketing issue. I think it's interesting, and, like learning Lisp, it has expanded my mind in interesting ways.

dbrock 17y ago

Go to #lojban on irc.freenode.net if you want to see Lojban conversation in action.

djanatyn 17y ago

As a speaker of lojban, I have to speak out. Lojban is not Ithkuil. Lojban isn't that complicated to speak, and most of the times on the forums, people are debating better ways to express sentences, not just because they're incorrect. Also, part of the lojbanic culture is to nag people if their grammar is incorrect. In English, most of the time, people may cringe or roll their eyes if they see someone saying something incorrectly, but it's considered polite in Lojban to correct someone's grammar. We also have a lot of beginners and new learners, so don't be too hard on them - they're just learning. There's a common misconception that logical = complicated, which is entirely not true. Lojban is in many places much simpler than English, and makes a lot more sense. I'll admit, there are a couple things which are more complicated, but lojban was built to be spoken by humans, and you don't have to be a genius to speak it. In short, it's logical - but not complicated!

Matt_Arnold 17y ago

DanielStraight, Consider a reasonably-popular, useful software package. At first, one might just toy around with it without sufficiently reading the documentation. Before long, one will learn to use it correctly, but not before getting a lot of error messages. That does not mean the software is impossible to use. Lojban is similar, except that the only place you get error messages in Lojban is from other users. What you are seeing is a symptom of how active the Lojban community is, especially since being featured in an xkcd comic. Many newbies are attempting it before learning it. You are seeing a process of welcoming and educating newcomers that has become the norm in our community. Consider the hypothetical software package again. You may wish to do something weird with it that is at the edges of its scope. You may need to make a feature request, or report flaky performance at a level for which the software is rarely used. That is what you are seeing as well. Our debugging committee, the BPFK, is hashing out a lot of edge cases. However, these edge cases are tangential to the day-to-day usage of almost anyone, which is bug-free. -Matt Arnold, President, Logical Language Group