1) Because my experience with language classes in high school and college has taught me that learning a language that I don’t already know is damn hard, not very fun, and is completely useless unless I invest a ridiculous amount of time and effort into becoming an expert (defined as someone who can watch TV in the language without subtitles, and/or read novels for adults written in that language without resorting to a dictionary)
2) Because there isn’t any media written in it that I especially want to read/watch/play which would inspire me to put in the ridiculous amount of time that becoming an expert in a language requires
That is some very valid reasons 2 and 3, but I will have to dispute 1.
Lojban is not hard. If you have experience with formal language/predicate logic/programming it is trivial to modify that understanding. Lojban has ~2000 words and word roots necessary to be completely fluent in it, compared to the average English speakers vocab of ~15000. The grammar can be summarized in 11 rules, there are no irregularities, no words that change arbitrarily, etc.
Lojban, compared to French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese or what it might have been you studied in high school, should not be hard.
Lojban is not hard. If you have experience with formal language/predicate logic/programming it is trivial to modify that understanding. Lojban has ~2000 words and word roots necessary to be completely fluent in it, compared to the average English speakers vocab of ~15000.
While technically true, those 2000-some words combine in nontrivial and mostly arbitrary ways. The language is no toki pona. I think the proper comparison is with Mandarin; there one learns on the order of 4000 characters, which then combine in not-immediately-obvious ways.
The grammar can be summarized in 11 rules,
The PEG that parses Lojban is the size of an X-Box. This claim is plainly false. There are more than 11 cmavo that substantially change the parsing of lojban in distinct ways.
there are no irregularities, no words that change arbitrarily, etc.
bisli—x1 is a quantity of/is made of/contains ice [frozen crystal] of composition/material x2
blaci—x1 is a quantity of/is made of/contains glass of composition including x2
Then suddenly,
cakla—x1 is made of/contains/is a quantity of chocolate/cocoa
canre—x1 is a quantity of/contains/is made of sand/grit from source x2 of composition including x3
danmo—x1 is made of/contains/is a quantity of smoke/smog/air pollution from source x2
These are all gismu places that have to be memorized, because there is no template rule for gismu referring to materials. While “there are no irregularities, no words that change arbitrarily” is technically true, there are also few regularities in the basic words (= gismu and cmavo) of the language. The situation is resoundingly worse once one starts forging lujvo.
The PEG that parses Lojban is the size of an X-Box [...]
I think the operating phrase here is “summarized,” it is akin to the way you can write a human-readable book about english grammar even though the only known parser for it is the human brain.
I have, specifically, viewed the Yacc code that can parse Lojban (with some clever use of error recovery) and it holds on the order of 600 rules. My point was that if you wrote a book on Lojban grammar it would have 11 chapters, each meticulously detailing a different category cmavo and their use, how to construct brivla, how to construct lujvo and some other things. Then you would only need that book, a slim dictionary and a pronunciation guide.
Then suddenly,
That is a very valid point, the amount of information is probably the same.
The PEG that parses Lojban is the size of an X-Box [...]
I think the operating phrase here is “summarized,” it is akin to the way you can write a human-readable book about english grammar even though the only known parser for it is the human brain. [...] My point was that if you wrote a book on Lojban grammar it would have 11 chapters, each meticulously detailing a different category cmavo and their use, how to construct brivla, how to construct lujvo and some other things.
I claim there is no meaningful “summary” of Lojban that constrains itself to eleven “rules”, each less than a typical paragraph in length. The reference grammar covers most of the language, taking arguably 18 or 19 chapters to do so. Most of those chapters cover distinct classes of words, to boot.
There is an ancient log that mentions 11 rules in it, but that is just that—ancient history (circa 1988! A quarter of the LW population wasn’t even alive then!). It doesn’t even pretend to be a reasonable catalog of the language. Perhaps they’ve updated since then, but a swift Googling doesn’t bring up anything more recent.
In summary, lojban is a hard language mixing the worst of incompressible memorization (e.g., gismu places, lujvo, fu’ivla), archaic logic/maths (e.g., mekso), and just straight-up bad design. I liked it precisely because it was challenging and fun to hack on. At the end of the day, a person wanting to learn a new language is better served by learning a common natlang.
In summary, lojban is a hard language mixing the worst of incompressible memorization (e.g., gismu places, lujvo, fu’ivla), archaic logic/maths (e.g., mekso), and just straight-up bad design.
Why do you consider it to be bad designed? What fault did it’s creators make?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634912 this guy seems to have tried to learn Lojban for a long time, and didn’t really get going with it. Most people who fail and drop out probably don’t talk that much about it.
Are long-time Lojban enthusiasts generally able to produce Lojbanic text and speech with little effort which other long-time Lojban enthusiasts can understand with little effort?
Lojban is not hard. If you have experience with formal language/predicate logic/programming it is trivial to modify that understanding.
How about having a conversation in it. (In normal conversations, people just don’t have the time to engage in Type 2 processes—most utterances take a few seconds at most. I’ve heard that lots of people tried to learn Lojban well enough to have real-time conversations in it and failed.) Also, the French, German, Russian, Spanish, or Portuguese you studied in high school are close enough to English—not only genetically (all Indoeuropean languages, FWIW), but also typologically—see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European. I’ve heard that native English speakers have an easier time learning French than Indonesian (probably the simplest non-creole natural language), FFS.
Is the vocabulary of Lojban rich enough that you could translate Hamlet into it? If Lojban’s vocabulary is that easy to learn, does that also render it trivial?
My first question was how you’d translate “Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!” into Lojban.
(An irc discussion got to the point of trying to translate the more logically explicated form “Let the current state of affairs be such that it contains blood that was not contained in the preceding state of affairs and that is blood that belongs to the Blood God and let the current state of affairs be such that it contains skulls that were not contained in the preceding state of affairs and that are skulls that belong in the Skull Throne.”, but it sorta seemed to lose something in that translation and the snappy Lojbanic version continued to evade us.)
I am quite a green beginner but with a bit of rephrasing you could get something analogous to “To drain the blood of our enemies is the practice of the blood god, we take the skulls from our enemies for building the skull throne.”
Lojban is by design combinatorial and has an explicit indicator for metaphorical expressions.
So it is like a turing complete programming language, you can probably translate Hamlet, but I do not know how well it would work.
In addition to paper-machine’s post, there are The Christian Bible, Tao Te Ching, The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), Le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), as well as numerous short stories.
1) Because my experience with language classes in high school and college has taught me that learning a language that I don’t already know is damn hard, not very fun, and is completely useless unless I invest a ridiculous amount of time and effort into becoming an expert (defined as someone who can watch TV in the language without subtitles, and/or read novels for adults written in that language without resorting to a dictionary)
2) Because there isn’t any media written in it that I especially want to read/watch/play which would inspire me to put in the ridiculous amount of time that becoming an expert in a language requires
3) Because nobody is going to pay me to study it.
That is some very valid reasons 2 and 3, but I will have to dispute 1.
Lojban is not hard. If you have experience with formal language/predicate logic/programming it is trivial to modify that understanding. Lojban has ~2000 words and word roots necessary to be completely fluent in it, compared to the average English speakers vocab of ~15000. The grammar can be summarized in 11 rules, there are no irregularities, no words that change arbitrarily, etc. Lojban, compared to French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese or what it might have been you studied in high school, should not be hard.
While technically true, those 2000-some words combine in nontrivial and mostly arbitrary ways. The language is no toki pona. I think the proper comparison is with Mandarin; there one learns on the order of 4000 characters, which then combine in not-immediately-obvious ways.
The PEG that parses Lojban is the size of an X-Box. This claim is plainly false. There are more than 11 cmavo that substantially change the parsing of lojban in distinct ways.
bisli—x1 is a quantity of/is made of/contains ice [frozen crystal] of composition/material x2
blaci—x1 is a quantity of/is made of/contains glass of composition including x2
Then suddenly,
cakla—x1 is made of/contains/is a quantity of chocolate/cocoa
canre—x1 is a quantity of/contains/is made of sand/grit from source x2 of composition including x3
danmo—x1 is made of/contains/is a quantity of smoke/smog/air pollution from source x2
These are all gismu places that have to be memorized, because there is no template rule for gismu referring to materials. While “there are no irregularities, no words that change arbitrarily” is technically true, there are also few regularities in the basic words (= gismu and cmavo) of the language. The situation is resoundingly worse once one starts forging lujvo.
I think the operating phrase here is “summarized,” it is akin to the way you can write a human-readable book about english grammar even though the only known parser for it is the human brain. I have, specifically, viewed the Yacc code that can parse Lojban (with some clever use of error recovery) and it holds on the order of 600 rules. My point was that if you wrote a book on Lojban grammar it would have 11 chapters, each meticulously detailing a different category cmavo and their use, how to construct brivla, how to construct lujvo and some other things. Then you would only need that book, a slim dictionary and a pronunciation guide.
That is a very valid point, the amount of information is probably the same.
I claim there is no meaningful “summary” of Lojban that constrains itself to eleven “rules”, each less than a typical paragraph in length. The reference grammar covers most of the language, taking arguably 18 or 19 chapters to do so. Most of those chapters cover distinct classes of words, to boot.
There is an ancient log that mentions 11 rules in it, but that is just that—ancient history (circa 1988! A quarter of the LW population wasn’t even alive then!). It doesn’t even pretend to be a reasonable catalog of the language. Perhaps they’ve updated since then, but a swift Googling doesn’t bring up anything more recent.
In summary, lojban is a hard language mixing the worst of incompressible memorization (e.g., gismu places, lujvo, fu’ivla), archaic logic/maths (e.g., mekso), and just straight-up bad design. I liked it precisely because it was challenging and fun to hack on. At the end of the day, a person wanting to learn a new language is better served by learning a common natlang.
Good point, I guess I hadn’t researched the issue sufficiently.
Why do you consider it to be bad designed? What fault did it’s creators make?
I believe the earlier comments in this thread make my position on this (which I share with myself from a year ago) clear.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634912 this guy seems to have tried to learn Lojban for a long time, and didn’t really get going with it. Most people who fail and drop out probably don’t talk that much about it.
Are long-time Lojban enthusiasts generally able to produce Lojbanic text and speech with little effort which other long-time Lojban enthusiasts can understand with little effort?
How about having a conversation in it. (In normal conversations, people just don’t have the time to engage in Type 2 processes—most utterances take a few seconds at most. I’ve heard that lots of people tried to learn Lojban well enough to have real-time conversations in it and failed.) Also, the French, German, Russian, Spanish, or Portuguese you studied in high school are close enough to English—not only genetically (all Indoeuropean languages, FWIW), but also typologically—see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European. I’ve heard that native English speakers have an easier time learning French than Indonesian (probably the simplest non-creole natural language), FFS.
Is the vocabulary of Lojban rich enough that you could translate Hamlet into it? If Lojban’s vocabulary is that easy to learn, does that also render it trivial?
My first question was how you’d translate “Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!” into Lojban.
(An irc discussion got to the point of trying to translate the more logically explicated form “Let the current state of affairs be such that it contains blood that was not contained in the preceding state of affairs and that is blood that belongs to the Blood God and let the current state of affairs be such that it contains skulls that were not contained in the preceding state of affairs and that are skulls that belong in the Skull Throne.”, but it sorta seemed to lose something in that translation and the snappy Lojbanic version continued to evade us.)
For my part, I’d translate it as:
.u’oga’ibu’o ko bevri lo so’i ciblu la ciblu cevni .i ko bevri lo so’i sedbo’u la sedbo’u nolstizu
Which glosses in English to:
[With a sense of superiority and courage:] Bring lots of blood to the Blood God! Bring lots of skulls to the Skull Throne!
EDIT: More accurate translation and back-translation, changed gadri, added so’i to English back-translation.
Basically—whoever tried to translate for you was really bad at generating English glosses.
I am quite a green beginner but with a bit of rephrasing you could get something analogous to “To drain the blood of our enemies is the practice of the blood god, we take the skulls from our enemies for building the skull throne.”
Good one.
Lojban is by design combinatorial and has an explicit indicator for metaphorical expressions. So it is like a turing complete programming language, you can probably translate Hamlet, but I do not know how well it would work.
In addition to paper-machine’s post, there are The Christian Bible, Tao Te Ching, The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), Le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), as well as numerous short stories.
Source
How about Alice in Wonderland?
Yeah, that’s probably good enough. ;)