Re: [lojban] lojban's difficulty

[Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 9/8/05, xah lee <xah@xahlee.org> wrote:
> on lojban.org site it is touted that lojban is really easy to learn,
> easier than for example any natural language, because it is artificial
> and being regular.
> 
> But I think actually lojban is probably very difficult to learn,
> because to understand lojban is tantamount to exploring the semantics
> and logic of human communication.

I get the very same feeling in a course on English grammar. It's not
that Lojban is a difficult language to learn, it's that *any* language
requires either lots of exposure and
learning-by-hearing-and-repeating, or a conscious understanding of the
semantics of the words that you're using. Native speakers of a
language learn using the first method, but only the second method
brings up the issues of semantics and logic.

As for the example, English makes the same distinction, only it's less
picky. "I drink the juice" can be treating the juice as a mass or as a
unit; it's not really clear. But when forming plurals, nouns treated
as a mass never change over to plural. You can have "two apples", but
not "two waters", unless by "two waters" you mean two glasses or
bottles or bodies of water.

Correct speaking in Lojban, as far as I can tell, requires very little
more than other languages in semantical distinctions, and those
semantical distinctions are ones that are understood by the speakers
even if they are not part of the grammar.

The only problem is that these distinctions cannot be taught without a
vocabulary to describe them, and introducing people to that vocabulary
can be difficult, because people aren't always aware of these
distinctions.

> One may still argue that it is difficult only
> because human are not used to it, that for someone who have studied it
> for a while or grew up with lojban would come with ease.

On the contrary, it is difficult only because it is foreign. It's
difficult in exactly the same way that learning Spanish would be, only
a little more so.

> This may be
> right, but still i think no other natural language forces user to
> understand semantic and logic like lojban therefore makes lojban quite
> more difficult than learning any natural language.

If you'd like to bring up specific distinctions made by lojban that
aren't made, even implicitly, by other languages, I'm sure many of us
would be interested to hear it.

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)