For the first post, I'm going to give a little background story about my foray into Lojbanistan.
It was October. I got to the Lojban article in Wikipedia by following random links. I was pretty intrigued about the idea of a logical language. I had once lamented the fact that logic is often viewed as a complicated subject, despite it being the foundation of reasoning, and is often taught in detail only after graduation from secondary school. I thus wondered, why is that? Is it because we cannot expect a 2nd-grader to distinguish between "inclusive" and "exclusive" or, or to understand that "A if B" is equivalent to "(not A) or B"? Is it because that last English expression, without the clarifying brackets, sounds equivalent to "neither A nor B", adding to the confusion?
But are these concepts inherently complex? Humans possess an innate capability for language, unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We were designed for it. I thus wondered, if language made logical distinctions clear rather than obscuring them, if we didn't have to resort to jargon and unpronounceable symbols to talk about them, would these concepts become more accessible?
I was also intrigued by the "attitudinal" system, which are little words included in Lojban for the express purpose of expressing feelings (including .ui for happiness, .oi for complaint, .iu for love, and even words that "mark up" text for special usage, like pe'a for metaphor, zo'o for humor and je'unai for sarcasm). Immediately I saw the applications, as I converse a lot on the Internet. Actually using them and remaining understood, however, was an entirely different matter. zo'o
I thus decided to look more into the language, and began learning it. Thus here I am now.
ta'o .a'o ko gleki xisyjbesla joi ninyna'asla doi ro tcidu
(By the way, a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you.)
1 comment:
There's a few different routes into the world of Lojban. I personally found Lojban mostly because of my interest in conlangs. The most common entryway seems to be people who are interested in logic, which is surely an effect of Lojban's marketing (such as the slogan "the Logical Language")! To me the logical aspects of Lojban are interesting, but they're just one of many aspects of Lojban that I enjoy.
Attitudinals are one of my favorite parts of Lojban, too. That's why I've been slowly beginning to put energy into Cniglic (Lojban's attitudinals applied to otherwise English text). My vision is eventually to create another entryway into Lojban, so people can find Cniglic as a fun easy little language, and then from there they'd have access to the rest of Lojban. (It'd be interesting to see the style of a beginning Lojban speaker who's already fluent in Cniglic!)
I think what's really the most fundamental characteristic of Lojban is its syntactic unambiguity. "Lojban, the Syntactically Unambiguous Language!" -- I don't know what newbies that slogan would draw in. :) A lot of what's interesting about Lojban isn't apparent at first glance, or even after you've learned a fair amount of the language. For instance it has this totally unique property of being able to build very long, complicated phrases that are sparkling clear-- but you can't actually read & write those interesting kinds of sentences until you're fairly fluent.
It's really hard to say if & how Lojban changes how one thinks. I've certainly changed how I've thought since learning Lojban, but it's been a couple of decades & I've changed in many ways! The population of Lojbanistan is self-selected & an odd cast of characters, so we can hardly study ourselves to see what knowledge of Lojban causes you to be like.
It seems to me though that Lojban is very different in many ways from any language that came before it, and that alone makes it worthwhile to me. Bringing a language to life takes a lot of effort from a lot of people for a long time, but I don't think the effort so many people have put into Lojban for so long has been wasted. It's entertained me & it's expanded my mind & I'm still looking forward to an ever deeper understanding of what possibilities Lojban adds to our world.
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