From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Oct 24 07:55:22 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:55:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1Ikhdh-0004ZB-GW for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:55:21 -0700 Received: from eastrmmtao104.cox.net ([68.230.240.46]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1Ikhde-0004YU-BT for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:55:21 -0700 Received: from eastrmimpo01.cox.net ([68.1.16.119]) by eastrmmtao104.cox.net (InterMail vM.7.08.02.01 201-2186-121-102-20070209) with ESMTP id <20071024145512.DGBS1395.eastrmmtao104.cox.net@eastrmimpo01.cox.net> for ; Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:55:12 -0400 Received: from [127.0.0.1] ([72.192.234.183]) by eastrmimpo01.cox.net with bizsmtp id 4Ev31Y00q3y5FKc0000000; Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:55:06 -0400 Message-ID: <471F5CBC.4070501@lojban.org> Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:54:52 -0400 From: Robert LeChevalier User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: usefulness References: <2204fa080710240614t4b9c184erd7d3acf2ac03ddb5@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <2204fa080710240614t4b9c184erd7d3acf2ac03ddb5@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 5566 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: lojbab@lojban.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Jared Angell wrote: > I am having a problem understanding the usefulness of a language that > no one actually is conversing in verbally. People are doing so. Not a lot, but more than last year, and more than the year before, etc. Besides spoken usage, there is a good deal of written usage. > I seriously think that if > Lojban isn't to be stillborn than steps have to be taken to get people > speaking it and thinking in it. There are no steps that can be taken. People who do not want to learn a language, won't. > Merely having a cool, well structured grammar whose lexicon was formed > from a groovy algorithm and which is totally logical on paper doesn't > mean that an actual language exists, IMHO. No argument from me on this point. > I really liked the idea of Lojban but at my present level of > involvement I see no point in carrying on with it if it is never going > to be anything more than a code That it is not. > that an extremely low percentage of > the Internet population uses to play mental games with one another. That will likely be the case for another generation, no matter what. It takes a long time to build a language community. > I see absolutely no reason why a well thought out English or even > Esperanto sentence cannot convey the same ideas as a Lojban sentence. Probably. But 1) will the typical English or Esperanto speaker execute such a well-thought-out sentence 2) will the typical English or Esperanto listener understand the speaker's well-thought-outedness. > It is true that complex philosophical, mathematical, and physics ideas > are more easily expressed in Lojban I'm not even sure of that. They are perhaps more *precisely* or *unambiguously* expressed in Lojban, but I question that they will be *easily* expressed. > but that statement is based on the > assumption that a person could actually think in Lojban No. One can formulate in Lojban without really thinking in the language. That is the way I speak the language for example. I don't make up a sentence in English and translate it, but I do come up with concepts thinking in English, then starting with keywords move over to Lojban and build a sentence. > which it > appears that no one does, or maybe half a dozen currently do to a very > limited extent. If a half a dozen do so, then that is a half a dozen more than 10 years ago. > When Ben Yehuda created the modern Hebrew partially constructed > language the way that language came to life was by gathering people > willing to speak it together. It didn't hurt that the people speaking the language already had a shared culture, and the shared ancient Hebrew literature. These communities of common interest also lived together to start with, and had social pressures from outside to motivate their common association. > The next step in the Lojban process should not be, with apologies to > the LLG, to let it evolve, but rather, to see to it that people are > speaking it in communities. The next step is to finish fully documenting the language. At each stage of more complete documentation, the community has grown significantly and more have chosen to invest the significant amount of time needed to learn. > And I feel that this is not such a lofty > goal. I feel that if key members of linguistics departments all over > the world were shown the inherit value of Lojban Linguistics departments cannot be shown the inherent value of Lojban, because to linguistics, Lojban has NO inherent value, and will not have inherent value until AFTER we have communities speaking the language and indeed native speakers who speak ONLY Lojban. Not even Esperanto has really achieved that - its small number of native speakers are bilingual in some other more useful tongue, and Esperanto has been around much longer than Lojban after being founded in a climate more amenable to international languages than today. The largest school of American linguists, that of Noam Chomsky, usually disparages the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and anything connected with it. Lojban gets even less interest from them. Occasionally we can find a linguist who will find some aspects of Lojban interesting, but only aspects. Most of the time what is interesting is when the community does NOT follow the language prescription. >than classes in it > could commence within a year and people would begin learning and using > this language academically. Linguistics departments couldn't teach a class unless they had a professor who was fluent in the language, even if they could be motivated to do so. That could not happen within a year, because I don't think people can achieve the necessary degree of fluency in a year. > This may be happening No. >and I am unaware of it but from what I can tell > Lojban is not growing at a sufficiently fast rate to survive. To survive what? As long as it is growing, then it is surviving. The languages that go extinct are those that stop growing. Lojban is actually growing at a significant rate. But if we double our numbers every 5 years, it will still take us 60 years to catch up to Esperanto, which isn't taken seriously by linguists (and you won't find many college courses in the language, though I suspect that there may be some). > Which is a shame, Lojban has a great deal to offer. To whom? For what purpose? > But I have to question > the motivations of anyone on this list if they are just learning a > language to type to perhaps 1000 in on their spare time. There are dozens of people who invent conlangs that no one learns except themselves. > For those of you who have no academic interests but who feel as I do I > would suggest teaching Lojban to your families or opening up a night > course in your local area where you teach Lojban after you yourself > have learned it to a certain degree. That has been done. Relatively few of us have families that are interested. Relatively few who have learned the language well enough to teach it have even rudimentary language education skills (teaching a foreign language is a particularly difficult challenge; teaching a language that has no culture is even more difficult). > Personally, I feel that the > software that teaches us Lojban is only useful to a limited extent and > I think I'll be putting together a home study course by creating new > software and making study CD's with Lojban selbri on them. I'm hoping > the combined effect will be such that even someone like myself that > has a hard time with language will be able to pick up this language. > This would greatly improve the learning time for Lojban and therefore > allow those who randomly find the website and are interested like > myself to learn Lojban and them go out and teach it as per my > suggestion. Every attempt to find a new way has a chance of succeeding. >2. My experience with the leading elements of the > Lojban community is that they have given all that they can give and > they are burnt out, tired, out or time, and grumpy that someone else > doesn't take up the torch already. So far as I know, I am the only "leading element" who has talked to you, and yes I am "burnt out, tired, out of time", though not particularly grumpy because in fact many others have in fact taken up the torch already. Indeed this is where you are missing a key aspect of Lojban's survival. Not one in a hundred artificial languages has built a community as large as Lojban's. Of those, only a half a dozen or so have survived long enough, and robustly enough, that the language inventor has been able to successfully turn over control of the language. JCB before us failed to do so, and his successors have not been able to do any better than keep his version of the language minimally alive. By contrast: Twenty years ago yesterday, there was my wife and I, newly married, as the only "speakers" of the language, if one can call our stumbled conversations with a vocabulary of a couple of hundred words "speaking". Perhaps 15 years ago, there were only a half dozen people who could write a coherent paragraph in Lojban. Ten years ago, we finally had a book out about the language, and perhaps 50 people who could do so. And five years ago, I started to turn over my leadership of the community to others, and the community is larger and more robust than ever. Considering that we haven't finalized the language definition yet, and have only two published books, and one semi-published, all being advertised solely by word of mouth, we are doing quite well. We didn't have the pop-culture significance of Klingon, which did grow faster, But I rather doubt that many people are interested in having Klingon taught in universities. >If the LLG were doing a better job The LLG is no more than a sum of its members, who are few, all part-timers, many of them students and almost all of the rest with families to support. It can only be a part time hobby unless someone really rich decides to endow us with enough money to support full time workers. That is more or less how Interlingua managed to be completed and to survive, and arguably is true for Klingon, since the language inventor was being paid by Paramount. > than Lojban would be something that was at least showing up on > slashdot Lojban showed up on slashdot around 1999-2000. We got an enormous number of new hits on our website, and we had nothing for people to follow up with since I think at that time we had no books yet published. If you google on lojban and slashdot, you will get 181,000 hits. > and talked about in certain academic circles. Why would Lojban be talked about in academic circles? > As far as I > can tell the only people outside of the rather small Lojban community > that know of the language are Esperanto speakers - and only a small > number of them. Within the last year, Lojban has been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where a European activist was written up for proposing that European patents be written in Lojban as a common neutral and unambiguous language. A feature article on constructed languages appeared a couple of months ago in the LA Times and was syndicated nationally. It mentioned Lojban among several others. But for the most part, why would people outside the community of speakers of the language know much about the language, no matter what language it is? > It is a shame that only the crafters of this rather > amazing tool are the ones who utilize it But they aren't. And indeed the people who use the language the most these days are for the most part NOT the ones who crafted it, which is itself rather amazing. > for the crafters of a tool > are known to only use a tool as it was intended and not for anymore. That would be meaningful if the crafters of this tool had a particular intention in crafting it, but we didn't. > It is well known that tools usually can be used for more uses than > they were intended, is it not? If you see every problem as a nail, then you will try to apply a hammer to it. %^) But I don't think the analogy works well for Lojban. If anything I tried to make the language too multifunctional, so that there are areas of the language that are designed in some detail but which see very little use. > I have heard it argued that the reason that there are so few texts yet > translated into Lojban is that it is so 'other-worldly'. No. The reason is that language translation is itself a difficult challenge if one has high standards (and Lojbanists tend to have high standards). It takes a long time to do it well, and there are too many other things to do that take less time, especially when there are yet relatively few who will read a text longer than a screenful in Lojban. > I think this > is a terribly crafted excuse for a language with such a small and > totally voluntary user-base that it is incapable of getting reading > materials produced or translated. You are welcome to do better. > Without reading material this language is nothing. So write some. > Things are not not getting translated into > Lojban because of the difficulty level. And the lack of time. > Things are not getting > translated into Lojban because the only people who are just fluent > enough to translate them do not have the time because they are not > being compensated for it. Or have other priorities for their limited Lojban time. If I were again working full time on Lojban, compensated or not, I would not be spending my time translating texts. That is not the priority now. This is a long-term project. > If people were in a Lojban community where > Lojban culture could develop and children grew up speaking Lojban (it > would be Utopia probably) The etymology of Utopia should be sufficient to answer that one. > then translating things and writing things > in Lojban would be as trivial as it was to translate thing from a > multiplicity of languages into Modern Hebrew when the state of Israel > was founded. Of course it was NOT trivial, despite the fact that there were a lot more speakers of modern Hebrew by the time the state of Israel was founded. > What Lojban really REALLY needs a a millionaire to sponsor it. Got any volunteers? > Lojban need visibility. Lojban needs marketing. People need to know about > this language...less than 1% of 1% of the Internet populous is aware > of this language from my calculations...how much of the world is that? About as many as we are capable of servicing. Marketing isn't cheap. Nor is "order fulfillment". And we are all part-time volunteers. > I mean if the slashdot community isn't even aware of Lojban It is. > Lojban T-shirts on thinkgeek There are Lojban T-shirts. There is also a Lojban clock. cafepress.com Look for "lojban", "loglan" (which is all Lojban stuff), and "Logfest" (which has the most interesting things) > That said, does anyone have an idea for how you would say 'geodesic > dome' in Lojban? I doubt if many beginners would (inventing words isn't really a beginner task), but let's see if any will rise to your challenge. (Hint - one would best know what the formal definition of one is, or would make a fu'ivla) lojbab