At 09:42 AM 01/14/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>I stumbled across the two languages' sites recently and find the goals to
>be quite interesting. I'm about 1/6 through "Understanding Loglan," but
>was wondering about the two different language communities. Before I
>invest too much more time in learning, can you give me some advice for
>picking between the two? For example, I wonder how the number of speakers
>of each language compares. Or if one is easier to learn than the other.
Needless to say, what I advise will be biased towards Lojban.
First of all, except for the lexicon (vocabulary), the two versions of the
language are not all that different. Thus it cannot really be said that
one is easier or harder than the other in terms of inherent
learnability. TLI Loglan has root words that more strongly reflect English
contribution (25% weighting vs 18%), and thus some may seem more
recognizable to a new learner. But this weighting pertains only to around
1000 words and the difference is not that much. In Lojban's favor is
somewhat better (in my opinion) flashcard software for learning the words,
if you have MS-DOS capability and want to use a flashcard-like drill
program. It works extremely efficiently. But in any event, once you have
learned a good number of the basic words, recognizability is not
particularly an advantage.
As for teaching materials, our reference grammar book is a COMPLETE
description of the language, and TLI Loglan has nothing like it. People
have learned the language from that book on their own, even though it was
not written as a textbook. We have a partial draft textbook, which people
seem to think is pretty good as far as it goes, but it is not being
actively worked on. I'm the author, so my saying that I think it is much
better than TLI's primer is quite biased - I don't think the style of TLI's
materials will prove very effective for self-teaching (indeed my textbook
has weaknesses which is one reason why I stopped working on it, until I
have the capability to write what really is needed). We have a separate
effort at a primer underway, with 8 lessons written by a teacher in Turkey,
that some people find pretty good. These are also in draft form and on our
website.
Our most effective teaching advantage is our active mailing list, where you
can get any of dozens of other Lojban students to help you over a problem
in understanding.
The Lojban grammar is more complex than the TLI grammar, but this
complexity is almost all in the form of optional bells and whistles that
make the language more natural to use or more logical to use in particular
situation. Almost any TLI Loglan sentence can be translated into an
equivalent valid Lojban sentence by direct word-for word substitution, but
Lojban may have a better way to say some things.
The reason for the added complexity is that Lojban has seen MUCH more
usage. Lojban has a couple of demonstratedly fluent speakers, and several
more who can converse easily, and still more who can maintain a chatroom
conversation on line, where speed is limited to typing. There are a couple
dozen who have demonstrated live conversational ability (not too many
chances to make such a demonstration). There are probably well over 100
who would fit the latter category.
To my knowledge, there are no fluent TLI Loglan speakers, and no one has
claimed to have held a conversation in TLI Loglan since 1977 (which
"conversation" according to one participant consisted of a few people
looking at wordlists a lot and occasionally saying something that was
corrected by Dr. Brown). There are a couple of people who claim to write
comfortably in the language, but for the most part, prior to Dr Brown's
death last year, almost nothing appeared in the language without first
being editted for correctness by Brown, so that even the better users have
little confidence that they use the language correctly. Meanwhile, several
Lojbanists, including myself, write as well if not better in TLI Loglan
than the people who nominally are the best, because Lojban skills are fully
transferrable.
Lojban has an active mailing list with over 200 members, growing
regularly. Traffic varies up to peaks, typically in summer, of 20 messages
a day. The complete archives of that list back to 1989 are available,
constituting tens of megabytes of Lojban text and information. There is an
IRC channel #lojban which might have a couple people talking at almost any
time of day or night because our community is worldwide. There is also a
Lojban-only email discussion list as well, but that has light traffic.
TLI Loglan has a mailing list of unknown membership, on which there
typically are no posts for a couple of months and then a short flurry of a
dozen or so before lapsing again into silence. In short, there is no real
TLI Loglan "community", but rather isolated users that have little contact
with each other. Part of this is because of how Dr. Brown ran his
organization, with him as the hub of a many-spoked wheel. But with Brown's
death last year, the TLI organization is largely rudderless. The new
leader of TLI has not consolidated power, and does not want to risk
offending Brown's family by making any changes; the two most important
leaders of TLI are both elderly retired people, and thus not inclined to
start major new initiatives. It is frankly my belief that the TLI language
effort is practically defunct.
We believe that there are some significant design flaws in TLI Loglan that
we have corrected, but they are difficult to explain to the novice, who
might not notice them. More seriously, the TLI Loglan community is more
prone to "encoded English" in their usage - translations that reflect
English colloquial usage. A simple example of this is the compound word
based on the metaphor "man-do" for "to man a ship", where the TLI Loglan
word for "man" refers only to male humans; the things that male humans "do"
by nature have very little relationship to boats.
The final argument is the one we started with. TLI Loglan was claimed as
copyrighted by the organization, and use of the language is theoretically
subject to intellectual property considerations, though it is unlikely that
they will be enforced now that Dr. Brown is dead. Lojban and its basic
design are in the public domain; we want the user community to feel totally
free to use the language. This difference was fundamental to our starting
the effort, and the result seems apparent. People are using Lojban.
Hopefully this more than answers your questions. I'll be happy to answer
further.