Lojban - a logical (human) language

http://neptune.spaceports.com/~words/lojban.html

by gnosis • 16 years ago

20 29 16 years ago

neptune.spaceports.com

skermes• 16 years ago

Descended from Loglan, whence came the old joke,

How many Loglan speakers does it take to fix a broken light bulb?

Two. One to fix it, and another to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.

In all seriousness, though, one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain. Being able to construct sentences that mean two (or three, or more) things at once and playing around with the intersections of polysemy (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2079) and listener context is great fun. I feel like you lose some of that when you take inspiration for your language as much from predicate calculus as from Chinese.

jey3• 16 years ago

Lojban has all of the wordplay and fun constructions of any natural spoken language. The difference is just that it parses cleanly. This means you can actually create richer constructions that are arbitrarily cleverly convoluted... you just have to hope the reader has enough stack space in his head to parse it!

Personally, I won't miss the self-parodies in English like the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...)

Towle_8• 16 years ago

> one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain

Agreed. Designed languages lack...poetry.

jey3• 16 years ago

False. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lojban+poetry

gnosis5• 16 years ago

I understand that you mean "poetry" in the metaphorical, not literal sense. Still the point about literal poetry being possible in Lojban is an important one:

"Original poetry has already been written in Lojban, and some has been translated into the language. Lojban's powerful tanru metaphor structure allows you to build concepts into words easily, as you need them, and has been used to create colorful images and to convey moving emotions. A Lojban speaker doesn't need a dictionary to use and understand millions of words that can potentially exist in the language. The absence of cultural constraints makes consideration of new ideas and relationships easier than in natural languages, spurring creativity. Lojban aids in communicating abstractions by identifying their nature explicitly. Lojban is thus a very powerful language, not only for poetry, but for discussing such abstract fields as philosophy, physics, metaphysics, and religion.

Lojban poets are already experimenting with new (and old) forms of poetry that seem especially well suited to the rhythm, sound, and flow of the language. Rarely do poets have such an opportunity to affect the development of a new language as they now can with Lojban. Lojban's rich and powerful. Lojban unleashes the full potential of poetic expression to communicate both concrete and abstract ideas."

http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/lojbanmo....

gnosis5• 16 years ago

"Lojban's powerful tanru (combinations of selbri into novel concepts) and word-building features make it easy to make fine distinctions between concepts. This discourages the tendency for individual words to acquire families of meanings. Lojban's tanru metaphors are themselves ambiguous; they specify a relationship between concepts, but not what the relationship is. That relationship can be made explicit using unambiguous logical constructs if necessary, or can be left vague, as the speaker typically desires. Similarly, portions of the logical structure of a Lojban expression can be omitted, greatly simplifying the expression while causing some ambiguity. Unlike in the natural languages, though, this ambiguity is readily identified by a reader or listener. Thus all ambiguity in Lojban is constrained and recognizable, and can be clarified as necessary by further interaction.

This precision in no way confines the meaning of a Lojban sentence. It is possible to be fanciful or ridiculous, to tell lies, or to be misunderstood. You can be very specific, or you can be intentionally vague. Your hearer may not understand what you meant, but will always understand what you said."

http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/lojbanmo....

mnemonicsloth• 16 years ago

"Oh, cool, a new Clojure library," I thought to myself.

Time to stop coding for a little while.

DenisM• 16 years ago

Wow, so this is the lifehacker's Klingon?

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

http://xkcd.com/191/

henrikschroder3• 16 years ago

Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has the "per" of English "person" and the ren of Chinese. cukta has the "ook" of English "book", all of Chinese shu(c is pronounced "sh"), and part of Arabic (and Turkish) kitap. vanju is like French vin and Chinese jiu. This makes learning words easier for the largest number of people.

I want to physically reach through my monitor and strangle him for writing that. Words in human languages are composed of morphemes, not letters. It's easier to learn words in foreign languages if you know how to dissect a new word into its morphemes so that you can read the meaning of the word.

By getting a five letter statistical average over completely different langauges, the morphemes of the original words will not be preserved, and therefore you cannot look at a lojban root word, dissect it into morphemes, and then read what it means.

"per" and "pre" are two completely different morphemes in english, the root of "book" is not "ook", it's "bo". "vin" and "van" are two completely different morphemes in French, etc, etc. The lojban words are not similar to their real-language roots in the same way that real words are to each other, instead they're similar based on the mathematical distance between letters, which is completely useless for learning it.

You can sort of figure out the above examples after the fact, after you have learnt the words, with the knowledge of what the word is in those eight languages. But given a lojban word you have never seen before, you have no way of knowing what it means, even if you know the word in all those languages.

sfwc2• 16 years ago

I don't think anyone claims that Lojban phonology will help people guess the meaning of its root words. Even if you guess that {klama} means "travel", you probably can't guess that it means precisely (x1 travels to destination x2 from origin x3 via route x4 using conveyance x5). As a native English speaker who's been learning Lojban casually for a few weeks, I find the phonological resemblances helpful mostly as mnemonics - {prenu} is easier to remember for sounding a little like "person", {nitcu} like "need", et cetera. (And remembering the place structures does get easier, there is a fairly consistent rationale to how they are chosen.)

henrikschroder3• 16 years ago

No, but the author of the article claimed that you can see "bits of different languages in them", which you can't. Neither morphemes nor phonemes are preserved, only letters. The method for creating these words make it probable that there will be at least one letter in the lojban word in common with the word in the six original languages, but there seems to be no guarantee that the letter or letters in common are from the actual root of the word, which are the important letters of the word.

Therefore, the way the root words in Lojban are constructed does not make the learning of words easier for the largest number of people, it just makes it really difficult for everyone.

Take your example of "klama". I can see that it shares "l" and "a" with "travel", but how do you construct a mnemonic for remembering it? It shares no morphemes and no phonemes with "travel", and there's no phonological resemblance either, so there's nothing to help you learn it if you are an English speaker, you just have to memorize it as-is.

I'm sure there are many other features of Lojban that are interesting, and I'm sure that compound words in Lojban are pretty easy to learn and construct, but the text I quoted from the article about root words shows a complete lack of understanding of how human languages work and grow and evolve.

psygnisfive• 16 years ago

While Lojban is "logical", human language is not. Or rather, it is, but it follows its own set of (well defined) rules. If Lojban does not follow these rule's, it's not truly learnable, and thus irrelevant. If Lojban _does_ follow these rules, and is genuinely learnable, then it offers little advantage except perhaps a pared down vocabulary that avoids ambiguity and redundancy, and a less flexible morphology and syntax. Assuming the latter, human languages change naturally, in order to facilitate learning and communication, and Lojban would change too, if actually used. Metaphor, ambiguity, imprecision, etc. all are the _products_ of language adapting itself to suit our needs better. So for all the "flaws" of natural languages, they work, and work well, and if Lojban were adopted by people, it would end up looking like a natural language, with all their "flaws". And that's a good thing.

keefe2• 16 years ago

On one of my consulting engagements, I met this guy who decided to try to raise his kid speaking klingon. The kid just showed no interest in it whatsoever, even though that is all that dad spoke to him for 2 years. I think a natural language has to evolve, perhaps something related to how our brains process language.

gnosis5• 16 years ago

I don't know how much we can really infer from one kid's dislike of Klingon. It's not exactly a statistically significant sampling.

keefe2• 16 years ago

Fair point, but in the absence of empirical data to the contrary anecdotal evidence supporting the intuitive point of view is something.

Lojban - a logical (human) language

Related Stories