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

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

do you think geekdom is enough of a cultural entity to sustain thsi language? That'd be cool if it were. I guess that's why esperanto failed -- it didn't have a strong enough cultural basis, or something?

p.s. I haven't clicked on the link yet, I will do that now and then maybe my questions will be answered. yay!

[alienghic.livejournal.com]

Wow... I had no idea you where that robin. I'd managed to work my way through some of Nick Nicholas' version of the lojban lessons. But learning a langugae by yourself can only go so far.

Then I had the idea of modifying festival and perhaps sphix to support lojban. That would allow me at least to practice with my computer. Not that I've made much progress on this plan, but I'm hoping that I'll eventually get to it.

[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.

[sepiamind.livejournal.com]

sheer geekdom has been enough to sustain lojban since the 1950s!

there's some use of lojban for names/cultural references in the
interlace (http://eve.speakeasy.net/~yara/int/begin.htm) project, a collaborative writing epic that took place within the larger scrytch project.

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

cool! I guess the geeks I know aren't the elite geeks, then, since most of htem don't use lojban. :(

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes, none other than he! There's another (more active) Robin on the Lojban list, so I generally sign my posts there as robin.tr

If you do anything with speech synthesis, be sure to let the Lojban community know. Should be easier then natural languages because there's no phonetic ambiguity in Lojban if people pronounce it reasonably correctly, and in the case of errors, the regular morphology would give the software a better chance of guessing what was intended.

[solri.livejournal.com]

For a while I ran a cyberpunk-tpye RPG. In the world I created, the main world languages were Spanglish for popular culture, Hanzi/Kanji for commerce and Lojban for technology. Mainly we just used Lojban for character's names (Solri - "Sun" - was an NPC, although as a beautiful female mechanical engineer, she didn't resemble me much) but a few bits of Lojban stuck, notably "mabla" (the all-purpose swearword) and "le do mamta cu gerku".

[kiad.livejournal.com]

unrelated, but turkish?

http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=georgesbataille&itemid=86736

[sepiamind.livejournal.com]

geekdom is a wide, treacherous but fertile sea full of many kind of critters. geeks who are into lojban are a tiny microecoystem; the vast majority of geek elites in all their bizarre plumage are unaffected.