Lojban In General

> You have all of these words with "sumti" and if people
> use words like "fa, fe, fi" you are expected to know
> which "x" means what. I don't think the human brain can
> work like that, at least, not fluently.

You do exactly the same in English. Prepositions introduce
the different arguments to verbs: you talk *to* someone,

• about* something, *in* a language. You have to learn these

sorts of things for every langauge, it's just that you don't
think of it that way, it's not made explicit, and you take
it for granted.

> This language looks like something that should be used
> for computers and not humans.

Those who have spent longer with the language than you will
probably consider this opinion to be rubbish. I do.

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Probably a half-dozen fluent speakers at a time, I'd guess. That's
vastly more successful than almost any other artificial language.
Other than, modern Hebrew, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, and a couple of
others, artificial languages never get even _one_ fluent speaker. If a
half-dozen speakers is considered a low number, that is not because
Lojban is bad, but because hardly anyone ever has any reason to want
to learn an artificial language.

Consider a Venn diagram with a circle of all the people who are
interested in artificial languages. There is a tiny circle nested
inside it, of all the people with the serious commitment to be able to
attain fluency in an artificial language. The serious, committed
circle is truly tiny. Most of that tiny circle is taken up by two
smaller circles: modern Hebrew and Esperanto. Hardly more than a half
dozen people are left over in the serious committed circle, and I'd
wager more of them learn Lojban than anything else.

I have no problem remembering sumti places because they're almost all
completely intuitive. When I set up flashcards to memorize each word,
I also set up flashcards to memorize the non-obvious sumti places that
surprised me. Remembering three sumti places in a word is the same
thing as remembering three words.

I wouldn't say Lojban is suitable for computers rather than humans,
but I would say that it can bridge the gap between them. It's
definitely more suitable for computers than any other language that
humans can speak.

- Eppcott

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 7:52 AM, arpgme <lojban-out@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?
>
> Author: arpgme
>
> To me, Lojban seems too logical and non-natural for me to learn fluently.
>
> You have all of these words with "sumti" and if people use words like "fa,fe,fi" you are expected to know which "x" means what. I don't think the human brain can work like that, at least, not fluently.
>
> This language looks like something that should be used for computers and not humans.
>
> Do you have difficulties remembering all of these cmavo and sumti places?
>
> How many fluent speakers are there of Lojban?
>

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On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 07:52:33AM -0700, arpgme wrote:
>
> How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?
>
> To me, Lojban seems too logical and non-natural for me to learn
> fluently.

Define "fluent".

Using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale as a standard:

There are perhaps 1-3 dozen people who are level 2, or could be with
some brushing up and listening to an hour or two of conversation.

There are somewhere between 5 and 10 people who are level 3 for the
most part (again, possibly with some brushing up; I know I'd need
some).

The problem is that Lojban is almost entirely lacking in level 3

• vocabulary*, let alone level 4. This makes it really hard to

define "fluency": if you know every word in the language, but you
still can't talk about your computer refusing to boot because
there's a single bit error in the second RAM chip, well, are you
fluent or not?

This is something we're putting some effort into.

-Robin

--
Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo
Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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> You have all of these words with "sumti" and if people use words like "fa,fe,fi" you are expected to know which "x" means what. I don't think the human brain can work like that, at least, not fluently.
I don't consider myself even close to fluent (although I intend to be)
but I really like the fa/fe/fi series - they're one of the features
that I'm most comfortable using. I'd almost call them intuitive.

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On 9/13/08, arpgme <lojban-out@lojban.org> wrote:
>
>
> How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?

Define "fluent". There are perhaps a few dozen people who can have a
comfortable conversation in Lojban. None of them are as fluent in Lojban as
they are in their native languages, but I don't think that's even possible--
no one knows the Lojban words for "carburetor" or "lemon merengue pie",
for instance, because there aren't any.

To me, Lojban seems too logical and non-natural for me to learn fluently.

Nah, it's just kind of strange at first. It honestly
is simpler than a natural language. Imagine what you'd say if some
conlanger had come up with Finnish or Chinese! (How many cases? You write
every word with a different ideogram? I'm not learning your crazy
language! :P)

You have all of these words with "sumti" and if people use words like
> "fa,fe,fi" you are expected to know which "x" means what. I don't think the
> human brain can work like that, at least, not fluently.

I'm not fluent in every gismu's obscure places, but there are definitely a
lot of gismu that I'm fluent in the place structure of . Let's take
"tavla". I know "tavla" like the back of my hand. The x1 is a speaker, a
talker. The x2 is someone who's talked to, a listener (well, they probably
don't have to be listening to be a selta'a, I guess). The x3 is a topic of
conversation, something talked about. The x4 is a language in which
something is spoken. I assure you that I don't have to think to recall
those, and that I can fluently both read and create any rearrangement of
them, such as "la .lojban. te tavla fi do" (Lojban is talked about by you.)
or "mi tavla fo la .lojban." (I speak in Lojban.) or "la .lojban. cu cinri
te tavla gi'e nandu ve tavla". (Lojban is an interesting subject of
talk, and a difficult language for talk.) I can recognize or use the
related lujvo "selta'a", "terta'a", and "velta'a". I could recognize
effortlessly sentences that use those lujvo and also other places, like "lo
cinri terta'a be fo la .lojban." (An interesting subject of Lojban
conversation.) (Also consider that I can also almost as easily understand
other lujvo ending in -ta'a, like "jbota'a": "mi jbota'a fi lo cinri" (I
talked in Lojban about something interesting.), so learning a gismu is
learning a whole slice of the language, not just a single word.)

The way that I know the places of gismu like "tavla" is indeed to know what
the places are, and to recognize from the grammar what sumti is filling what
place. I'm very used to various common rearrangements like "te broda fi",
so I don't have to think much about what sumti is going where. But you
should note that even if a place is unmarked (or incorrectly marked--
I've seen nintadni a number of times say "tavla fi" or "tavla
fo" when they meant the other and understood), it's rarely very
difficult to figure out what's going on. The gismu
"tavla" has three trailing places: x2 which is usually a person,
x3 which could be anything, and x4 which is a language. So if it's a
language, it's probably the velta'a, and if it's a person, it's probably the
selta'a, and if it's anything else then it's probably supposed to be the
terta'a. (You don't have "lo nu do klama le zarci" (an event of
your going to the market) as a selta'a.) That sort of typematching
provides a lot of redundancy in Lojban in a lot of situations.

I don't think that the numbered places are harder to learn or use than
the syntactic places of natural languages, they are just unusually sharply
defined. English has prepositional places, for instance, and prepositions
react in idiosyncratic and sometimes bizarre ways in relation to each verb.
New students of English make frequent errors with arbitrary questions like
which preposition to use, or whether a verb can take a direct object. These
structural matters are no less arbitrary in natural language, and they are
much less sharply defined, so on the whole Lojban is tremendously easier.
Of course you must remember that learning all the quirks of a natural
language takes many years, so tremendously easier than that is still quite
hard!

> This language looks like something that should be used for computers and
> not humans.

Semantically it's a very human language. It does have this property of
having a certain kind of grammatical structure that's parseable, terminators
and so forth. It does take a little getting used to. But it's certainly
possible to become fluent in the use of terminators; I am. I may have
to think consciously about the terminators in an
especially tricky piece of prose, but I don't think twice about them in
conversational sentences. You should note that not all of the capabilities
of the language are fully explored in all ordinary conversation! A lot of
talk in Lojban is formulaic, if not ritualistic. I was thrown the first
time I saw the now-common well-wishing phrase "lo melbi ko li'i cerni" (Have
a beautiful morning.), which uses interesting and (previously)
lesser-explored parts of Lojban's grammar. Now that that phrase is common,
I've seen more frequent use of the second place of "li'i" in general, so
that's something that's helpful right now to understand IRC conversation
(the x2 of li'i is the experiencer), but it was largely unknown a few weeks
ago, as are plenty of other seeming complexities. It's a large toy
with many parts, in other words, and it's not so hard to play with us if
you know which ones we've been in the habit of using lately.

Do you have difficulties remembering all of these cmavo and sumti places?

I know at least half of the cmavo well-- I'm missing a lot of BAI, FAhA, and
the math stuff. I know at least half of the gismu well, and I have at least
some recognition of pretty much all of them. I mostly still only recognize
the most common rafsi, though I've started making flashcards, so
I'm more likely to recognize ones that start
with "B". My vocabulary is sufficient for IRC, but
I still generally have to look up at least a word/paragraph in prose
(where there's lots
of gismu used for physical objects and situations that don't come up
as much in conversation).

How many fluent speakers are there of Lojban?
>

One more if you'll stick with us?

You're not expected to get it all at once. Just hang out and play with some
of the easier parts of the language, and pick things up a piece at a time.
We don't have a decent pedagogy put together, so it's difficult to get
started sometimes. But the language itself really is fundamentally simple.

mu'o mi'e se ckiku

I'm just gonna stay positive and keep practicing on flash cards. I hope I become fluent soon because Lojban is a cool looking language and it really does seem like the most logical. I want to make YouTube videos on learning the language but I guess I'll have to improve more first.

> Define "fluent". There are perhaps a few dozen people who can have a
> comfortable conversation in Lojban. None of them are as fluent in Lojban as
> they are in their native languages, but I don't think that's even possible--
> no one knows the Lojban words for "carburetor" or "lemon merengue pie",
> for instance, because there aren't any.

But could someone who was sufficiently versed in lojban, create a word
on the fly for those things? It would not be "official" but in the
context, would it get the point across?

If I'm discussing desserts with a friend and I say,
lemon-whipped-egg-round-thing, would it likely be understood?

If I'm discussing with what's wrong with my car and I say
air-fuel-mix-device, wouldn't the mechanic likely know what I'm
referring to?

To me, this type of ability for a language to create words on the fly
is a fascinating part of the language. Is this really something
someone could do mid-sentence? I mean, we do it in English: it's that
lemon-round-sweet-thing-with-fluffy-white-stuff-on-top. We use
hyphens, but lojban has something a little more sophisticated.

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On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 10:44:38PM -0700, joel@mentics.com wrote:
> > Define "fluent". There are perhaps a few dozen people who can
> > have a comfortable conversation in Lojban. None of them are as
> > fluent in Lojban as they are in their native languages, but I
> > don't think that's even possible-- no one knows the Lojban words
> > for "carburetor" or "lemon merengue pie", for instance, because
> > there aren't any.
>
> But could someone who was sufficiently versed in lojban, create a
> word on the fly for those things?

Sure, but how would you know you had been understood? For *sure*,
I mean?

> If I'm discussing desserts with a friend and I say,
> lemon-whipped-egg-round-thing, would it likely be understood?

Oh, you mean lemon cheesecake, yeah?

-_-

-Robin

--
Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo
Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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2008/9/14 Brett Williams <mungojelly@gmail.com>:
> Define "fluent". There are perhaps a few dozen people who can have a
> comfortable conversation in Lojban. None of them are as fluent in Lojban as
> they are in their native languages, but I don't think that's even possible--
> no one knows the Lojban words for "carburetor" or "lemon merengue pie",
> for instance, because there aren't any.

What's wrong with using fu'ivla for "carburetor" for example? Many of world's
language (for example, Japanese) is full of loan words for modern stuffs.

--
Seo Sanghyeon

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On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 03:42:57PM +0900, Seo Sanghyeon wrote:
> 2008/9/14 Brett Williams <mungojelly@gmail.com>:
> > Define "fluent". There are perhaps a few dozen people who can
> > have a comfortable conversation in Lojban. None of them are as
> > fluent in Lojban as they are in their native languages, but I
> > don't think that's even possible-- no one knows the Lojban words
> > for "carburetor" or "lemon merengue pie", for instance, because
> > there aren't any.
>
> What's wrong with using fu'ivla for "carburetor" for example? Many
> of world's language (for example, Japanese) is full of loan words
> for modern stuffs.

Nothing; someone just has to define them and get other people to
learn them. If you make one up in the middle of a conversation,
you're unlikely to be understood in practice (see
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/double-illusion.html ; this
has nothing to do with Lojban).

-Robin

--
Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo
Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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On 9/14/08, joel@mentics.com <joel@mentics.com> wrote:
>
> To me, this type of ability for a language to create words on the fly
> is a fascinating part of the language. Is this really something
> someone could do mid-sentence? I mean, we do it in English: it's that
> lemon-round-sweet-thing-with-fluffy-white-stuff-on-top. We use
> hyphens, but lojban has something a little more sophisticated.
>

I've just lately gotten to the point where I'm able to invent or recognize
lujvo on the fly. What I would say is that there is a lot of word-inventing
going on all the time, but Lojban's vocabulary is so thin still that the
words being invented are very basic. Swimming around in the wading pool of
Lojban's few thousand active words has given me an appreciation for the
capacities of a well-developed vocabulary. A whole team of many thousands
of words work together to raise the level of communication, by making each
word choice a more precise affair. You can't really invent-on-the-fly your
way to that different level of precision; you just trade vaguenesses. The
raw materials of lujvo-making are just the gismu, so a nonce lujvo is
generally just vaguer than a suggestive phrase of the same gismu would be.

So you can't just invent a bunch of words as you're trying to say things,
and invent the language all at once. They sort of tried to do that once
upon a time, it seems to me, and got really stuck in it, and the real active
vocab of the language languished meanwhile. You can invent words for fun
any time you want, but in order to invent a word and really get it to stick
& become the language that we use, it has to be the right word at the right
time. Lojban can't actually absorb a word for carburetor right now, because
we don't have words for anything else in engines, we don't have that whole
terrain. To expand the language into a new terrain, you have to first lay
down a basic foundation, & gently lead the conversation to explore it.

mu'o mi'e se ckiku

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 03:09, Brett Williams <mungojelly@gmail.com> wrote:
> You can't really invent-on-the-fly your
> way to that different level of precision; you just trade vaguenesses. The
> raw materials of lujvo-making are just the gismu, so a nonce lujvo is
> generally just vaguer than a suggestive phrase of the same gismu would be.

Exactly right.

> So you can't just invent a bunch of words as you're trying to say things,
> and invent the language all at once. They sort of tried to do that once
> upon a time, it seems to me, and got really stuck in it, and the real active
> vocab of the language languished meanwhile. You can invent words for fun
> any time you want, but in order to invent a word and really get it to stick
> & become the language that we use, it has to be the right word at the right
> time. Lojban can't actually absorb a word for carburetor right now, because
> we don't have words for anything else in engines, we don't have that whole
> terrain. To expand the language into a new terrain, you have to first lay
> down a basic foundation, & gently lead the conversation to explore it.

Well, I'd go further than this. Language is a tool. Like any other
tool, people's primary use for it to get what they want, to accomplish
their goals. The closest goals of any conlang are art (la alis,
smaller works, poems) and bridging the language gap. So far lojban has
seen quite a lot of the former, and very little of the latter. (Which
isn't to say anything bad about Lojban, by any means. Developmental
stages, etc. etc.) Art doesn't attract very many people, because
there's plenty of it in other languages. But, in specific
circumstances, Lojban as an interlang could have a very high

• instrumental* value, which I think is the only compelling

circumstance that could lead to heavy development of it. What other
situations does Lojban have a high instrumental value in?

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
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On 9/16/08, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Art doesn't attract very many people, because
> there's plenty of it in other languages.

True enough, but I personally think that Lojban is an exceptional language
for art. It's so flexible, there's so many options for things. I think we
could attract people just for Lojban's artistic qualities, if we develop and
advertise them more. .i la .lojban. cu xamgu pe'i jai larcu .i cinri valsi
bo tarmi .i cinri valsi bo sance .i cinri cizra gerna bo stura

What other situations does Lojban have a high instrumental value in?
>

I think that we could make Lojban unusually suited for any particular
purpose, just by focusing and making a lot of lujvo and getting the language
comfortable with a topic. If we choose any topic and establish a vocabulary
around it, we'll head slowly towards the point where we can truly say that
Lojban is a far superior language for some specific set of concepts.

One that comes to mind as a no-brainer is computer
programming. Obviously we have enough programmers in
the community, and the bar to entering Lojban is always going to be
lower for programmers, so it makes sense on the face of it.

Donri and I have also been discussing a Lojbanic anarchists' association--
any other anarchists around?

One interest many of us share (ka'u) is liking the Dvorak keyboard, but I'm
not sure that needs much vocabulary. I guess it could use a word or two,
though! Is there even a word yet for "Dvorak keyboard"? .i .ei zasti

mu'o mi'e se ckiku

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 07:56:58PM -0500, Chris Capel wrote:
> What other situations does Lojban have a high instrumental value
> in?

I have a *completely* non-professional suspicion I've been holding
on to for a while: I wonder if Lojban would be easier for autistics
to communicate in, because of the attitudinals and the strict
structure?

If so, that'd be an interesting semi-Sapir-Whorf effect.

-Robin

--
Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo
Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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Brett Williams wrote:
> True enough, but I personally think that Lojban is an exceptional
> language for art. It's so flexible, there's so many options for things.

I think Lojban actually has more interesting potential as an "artistic"
language than a "logical" language.

Lojbanists praise the language's unambiguousness, but human beings are
so good at resolving ambiguous messages that I'm not sure the lack of
ambiguity gives Lojban much power. But the breadth of tenses, aspects,
attitudinals, etc., seems to truly distinguish Lojban from natural
languages.

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On 9/17/08, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
>
> I have a *completely* non-professional suspicion I've been holding
> on to for a while: I wonder if Lojban would be easier for autistics
> to communicate in, because of the attitudinals and the strict
> structure?
>
> If so, that'd be an interesting semi-Sapir-Whorf effect.
>

I'm diagnosed with Asperger's, a related condition to autism, and I find
Lojban much easier to communicate in. My impression is that it's only in
small part because of the structure of the language, and more directly
because of the attitude of the community toward the use of the language.
For instance, it's not just that there are attitudinals like {.ui} or
{.ii}, but that there is this *directness*
collectively understood in the semantics of them: You really do say
{.ui} because you feel happy, and {.ii} because you feel scared. And
you can say {.ui} in *any* circumstance where you feel happy-- English
has a word "wee!", but you can use it only a certain social configuration:
It's casual, childish, frivolous, etc. Because
Lojban's words have this feeling of being "logical",
in this aesthetic sense of being above the fray, they lack some of
the implicit social patterns (confusing to autistic spectrum people)
that are hidden in most natlang words.

My belief about Sapir-Whorf is that thought is somewhat strongly conditioned
by language, but mostly by unconscious functions of language. By sharing a
label that implicitly groups some referents, selbangu collectively establish
socially constructed divisions in reality. Those territorial lines between
semantic spaces are constantly shifting unconscious landscapes, and the
dense information stored in those collective thought-pools is repeatedly
communicated to all of the selbangu along with the superficial content
of each utterance. I believe therefore that Lojban's future effect on the
human mind is as half-complete as the semantic pictures underlying the gismu
places. Only the most used places have the awake
living character of well-loved words. Most of our language is
sitting dusty and dry. I think there's a tremendous amount of unused
potential storage space in those unconscious semantic terrains, and what we
put into those deep meanings will determine much of the character of what
it's like to think in Lojban in the future.

mu'o mi'e se ckiku

On 9/17/08, Seth Gordon <sethg@ropine.com> wrote:
>
> Lojbanists praise the language's unambiguousness, but human beings are so
> good at resolving ambiguous messages that I'm not sure the lack of ambiguity
> gives Lojban much power.

I think it's possible to underestimate Lojban's
difference in this respect, and I think it shows some of how Lojban
can involve a different way of thinking. We're certainly good at resolving
ambiguities in natural language, but what we're equally good at on
the other side is structuring our language so that ambiguity
happens to be avoided. We speak casually in ways that are
habitual and familiar, relying upon habit as a crutch, or we
carefully arrange large sentences so that it's possible to understand them.
Ambiguity is reduced to a
managable level overall in the process of communication, true,
but only as a result of a certain effort.

Lojban resolves certain ambiguities in a radically different way, is all:
Rigorous termination instead of loose familiar structures. It's sort of the
difference between tinker toys that click together at distinct angles
(Lojban) vs long pliable fibers that can be woven together
(natlangs). Lojban seems clunky if you expect it to flow in the
graceful interweaving lines
of natlang grammar. It's only once you accept it as what it
is-- these angular, distinct interlocking pieces-- that you can begin to use
Lojban to construct the kind of bizarre swirling avant-garde contraptions
that natlangs could never dream of.

My experience of speaking in English is of thinking of phrases and stringing
them together, trying to make them self-similar enough that everything
implies properly what else it's trying to be talking about. There's a
certain cognitive effort in putting together a phrase, making it run
smoothly, and it mostly consists of seeing that the references and movements
of the sentence are expected enough that the reader poor dear won't be
derailed. My experience of speaking in Lojban is of having certain
referents in mind, and relationships between them, then describing them all
in whatever order, along with decorations explaining why everything's there
and what it means. The cognitive effort isn't in making sure the phrase
falls together properly by its habit & semantics, but rather just seeing
that it's properly structured, that it puts things where they are meant to
be, and that things are described with clarity.

I enjoy speaking complicated English well enough, but there is something
spectacularly sparkling clean about writing a larger sentence in Lojban that
no other language I know of can touch. I felt very different writing the
following sentence than I did writing this English text:

le nu mi cusku dei do kei
le nu mi tavla fo la .lojban. kei
le nu mi prenu gi'e pilno le jbobau kei
le nu mi jbota'a gi'e jbopre kei
cu du le ca fasnu

(An event of I express this to you,
and an event of I talk in Lojban,
and an event of I'm a person and use a Lojbanic language,
and an event of I Lojban-talk and am a Lojban-person,
are all the same event and are happening now.)

mu'o mi'e se ckiku