From rslau@mindspring.com Mon Mar 22 08:10:54 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Mon, 22 Mar 2004 08:10:56 -0800 (PST) Received: from blount.mail.mindspring.net ([207.69.200.226]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1B5S0r-0007Le-RE for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Mon, 22 Mar 2004 08:10:53 -0800 Received: from user-38ld1ss.dialup.mindspring.com ([209.86.135.156] helo=sodor.mindspring.com) by blount.mail.mindspring.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 1B5S0h-0001D2-00 for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Mon, 22 Mar 2004 11:10:44 -0500 Received: from localhost.localdomain (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by sodor.mindspring.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9DB6A41F4 for ; Mon, 22 Mar 2004 11:10:27 -0500 (EST) To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: lojban qua lingua franca (OT) In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 22 Mar 2004 08:38:42 EST." <19f.221cf9ac.2d904662@wmconnect.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 11:10:27 -0500 From: Bob Slaughter Message-Id: <20040322161027.9DB6A41F4@sodor.mindspring.com> X-archive-position: 614 X-Approved-By: rslau@mindspring.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: rslau@mindspring.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners > In a message dated 2004-03-22 5:22:51 AM Eastern Standard Time, > ecartis@digitalkingdom.org writes: > > > Esperanto is great if you're a native speaker of Indo-European languages, > > but > > carries a lot of baggage that inhibits native speakers of languages like > > Swahili, Japanese, and Chinese. > > everything i've heard makes me think that esperanto is very popular in both > china and japan. there doesn't seem to be much baggage inhibiting them. Nothing much, just things like singular vs plural, time-based tenses and first/ second/third person voice. Those are the types of places where non-IE speakers are prone to make errors, especially in quick conversational speech. Chinese and Japanese *don't have* those features at all. And just because they are *popular* doesn't mean they are *easy*. Lojban's "mi patfu" is grammatcially *much* more like the Chinese phrase than is Esperanto's "Mi estas la patro." > i found esperanto to be very easy. And your native language is what? Esperanto is *amazingly* simple for most European speakers, but just as odd in many ways to non Europeans speakers as is English or French, only Esperanto has regular pronunciation and no irregular word formations. > i find lojban to be very hard to learn, > especially the vocabulary. Out of curiosity, what other languages have you learned? I found German fairly easy, because of its structural similarity to English, and the reasonable number of cognates. Japanese, on the other hand, is much harder, because of the 100% new-ness of the vocabulary, plus the uniqueness of the grammar (imagine the awkwardness of an English speaker dealing with a language that doesn't have *any* pronouns...) I find Lojban simpler for me to learn than Japanese because there is less material to learn, only about 1300 gismu, and the basics of the grammar are straightforward. But getting the full *power* of Lojban's grammar down is tougher, but so far seems to be very useful, as it rewards the re-thinking of how to express things. And in language learning, memorizing vocabulary is the most time consuming activity, but in many ways the *easiest*. Re-wiring the brain's grammar nodes is much tougher. > my opinion is still that all language groups will find lojban equally > DIFFICULT to learn. That's also what *I* said. :) Though I think Lojban is still simpler to learn than any natural language, and all in all isn't *that* difficult. Can you tell I spent several years in grad school studying linguistics? :) -- Bob Slaughter, rslau@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/ North Georgia Modurail: http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/ngm/ In which language of the world does the word 'taxi' mean "I cannot drive"? e'osai ko sarji la lojban fo lonu pilno -- http://www.lojban.org/