Lojban lessons

[robinturner]

Just found that my Lojban course, which I put in the capapble hands of Nick Nicholas, has a new version (it it were a program this would probably be 0.9.8). From my modest beginnings, it has now grown to over 200 pages. Wow, that's a real book! You can find it here.

For the uninitiated - Lojban is a constructed language based (partly) on predicate logic - sort of esperanto for geeks. One of thngs I like about it is that despite its logical structure, it has a whole class of words for expressing emotions, managing discourse etc. My occasional "current mood" comments are in Lojban.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

Actually, Lojban is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible (many other constructed languages have a conscious or unconscious bias towards certain natural languages). It came out of an earlier project, Loglan, which was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis* (though many/most Lojbanists disagree with whorf, or are unsure that the hypothesis is testable).

The "geeky" comment was rather tongue in cheek, though it's true that a very large proportion of the Lojban community are invovled in IT (Lojban itself has a YACC** machine grammar, and the basic vocabulary was computer generated). We also have a lot of linguists (unsurprisingly) and logicians (also unsurprisingly - "lojban" means "logical language" in Lojban).

* The idea that language influences thought.
** Yet Another Computer Compiler.