[lojban] Re: Joining the Ranks of the BPFK: The LRWTF

["Adam Shepley" <akmshepley@gmail.com>]

Note: my point of view is of someone outside the lojban community. I have no emotional attachment whatsoever to it. 

No wonder the lojban community seems to be struggling to attract newcomers! I would not call myself a citizen of "Lojbanistan", but I have spent some effort into understanding the structure of lojban. I have been lurking on this mailing list since the beginning of January and my post earlier today was the first I've made. I doubt I will make any more.

I like the idea of lojban. I like the attempt to eliminate ambiguity. I love the derivation of the gismu from more than just european tongues. I have thought lojban was the ideal conlang for me since I first encountered it in 2004. During my annual Thanksgiving trip from (USA) Georgia to North Carolina I placed brochures (double-sided printed and folded by me at home) in all the gas stations and restaurants along the way. I was so passionate about the language I took the introductory book (again, 2 sided printed by me) to show all of my family members. I even currently read "la alis. cizra je cinri zukte vi le selmacygu'e" to my 8 month old daughter (selmacygu'e is, incidentally, one of the coolest words in any language). I did feel and still feel that lojban's sound, ease of pronunciation, logical structure, machine readability, and possibly-mind-altering expressiveness are all very attractive features in conlang for fun and for practical auxiliary use. The big problem with the language lies with the "lojban community."

I have never tried to contact anyone regarding lojban because the extant community struck me as basically inaccessible. I am not a language snob. I opine that the majority of the oldest and most prolific amongst you are in fact that. Linguistics otaku who are content to tinker and bicker about minutiae while a genuinely valuable language moulders in obscurity. 

In the ckafybarja archive materials (which I have struggled through for years) it is somewhat discussed that lojban requires a community: I suggest that a de facto community has in fact grown around the language already; a community which is unwittingly xenophobic.

Beyond the issues with the website mentioned by Timo in his post which I will not reiterate, there are a few key problems I see with the lojban "community". If these problems were fixed, I believe many more people would be attracted to the language: as with esperanto the number of speakers would number in the millions rather than hundreds. I think that would be a good thing. (and historically lacking with lojban.)

Inaccessibility

Most people aren't linguists. They are unfamiliar with the IPA and don't know alveolar from palatalized. Most people aren't grammarians either. Reading the posts to the lojban-list is not a joyous proposition to a newcomer. I assure you. The posts generally focus on language constructs which no newcomer will want or even be able to discuss. The majority of posts seem to be an ongoing dialogue between a core group of around 8 to 12 people. What, from my vantage point, could be described as a clique. Inaccessible. Maybe to some people a scant two months is not long enough to form a proper appreciation for the lojban community. I don't have more time than that.

Mailing lists

It took me several hours of navigating the lojban website in order to find and then successfully subscribe to the mailing list. Timo writes, "I would really prefer having the forums software as a front-end to the mailing list and not the other way around, as to me the mailing list is clearly superior in managability, ease of use, clearness(??), accessibility, data loss robustness et al." I have never maintained a mailing list server. I do not know about managability issues or "data loss robustness et al" but I do disagree with the "clearly superior" nature of the (subscriber's end) "ease of use", ?"clearness(??)", and most definitely "accessibility."

Technology moves on. Mailing lists feel archaic and stodgy, like actually using usenet (viagra or russian models, anyone?) Along with the embedded newlines in most of the posts (are you guys all using pine or emacs or something for reading mail?) which is a notable anachronism in these days of xml and css. There is such a thing as word-wrap. The dominance of the our-way-or-the-highway attitude on the list (and website) also contributes to the pre-AOL empimpled-fanboy network atmosphere. The typical casual browser to the lojban site is likely to be alienated by these strange quirks. I certainly am.

The much commoner (if less "superior") paradigm for community access on the internet is the web based forum. They are generally simple, most function the same, the databases containing them are certainly archivable, they can be accessed from any modern web browser, and they can be decorated to match the rest of the web site (important for establishing community? I think so.). I can reliably guess that the average visitor to any forum couldn't give 2 pints of crap for which particular content management software was used: php, asp, Drupal, phpBB, Joomla, wiki tiki tookie too, or whatever. 

Are mailing lists superior? Probably, but so is the command-line. That does not make it the instrument of the general user. 

Butts in Seats

A chronic problem for lojban seems to be getting new people to join in and learn the language. I recently read an article published in 1988 in some magazine. (I cannot find the article again due to navigational difficulties on the lojban website, so my references are only from memory.) The article was an interview with lojbab and an interviewer. The interviewer expressed doubts about the allure of lojban for practical use by comparing it to esperanto. A short time after esperanto's creation many people acquired it and it flourished. A long time (at the time of the article's publication) few had actually acquired it. The dilemma, in my eyes, is that this was 20 years ago and today still relatively few people have learned to speak lojban. Why is that, I wonders? I postulate that since language acquisition is a nontrivial task which inherently requires human interaction, the (my?) perceived lack of accessible community dissuades potential learners from coming in.

(Not) A Whole Lotta Love

When I finally do post, attempting to show genuine interest, indicate possible skills (the site as is is coded in php, is it not?), and offering to help, I get the responses that I did. Hey, no big deal. I have no big investment in this community. I will survive. I do doubt that without a motion towards more openness and accepting various viewpoints that lojban unfortunately will not.

***
This post may seem very heavy or like both barrels at once, and it is. I have been formulating this exposition for quite some time in my head; the response from Timo  to my first post was simply just enough to trigger this outpouring. It seems to me that the core of the lojban community does not want to see their baby grow up; they don't want to see it drift or have people judge things en masse about the language. Maybe they don't want to see it fail to support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's their little game, and I don't begrudge them that. I just don't want to waste effort to acquire a language spoken only by and subject to the whims of a small group of grammar lawyers.

This post perhaps is a bit flamey, and I may appear callous or unyeilding. I do not apologize. I am not intentionally "trolling" here, I have a genuine interest in the success of this language. I hope that this post will potentially serve as a wake up call to the leaders of the lojban community: I hope to check back in two years, or five years, and see the millionth lojban speaker fluently joining the new, open lojban community. I pray that I won't come back in 2028 to see the same twelve conlangers picking the same grammatical nits they are today.

Quite sincerely, 

Adam K Shepley