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[lojban] Re: [bjorn.jansson@teacher.com: Web-Based Feedback]
coi bjorn.
Your questions have been forwarded to the lojban mailing-list (the one
in English, which is also mirrored as a Yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/ ).
I will try to answer some, and maybe somebody else will add more
information.
There are thousands of artificial languages. See :
-
http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?
category=Languages%7CBy+Language%7CArtificial+Languages
- http://www.langmaker.com/
- http://www.smart.net/~bartlett/ial.html
- http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
- etc.
Esperanto ( http://www.uea.org/ ) is the most successful among the
artificial languages, and many lojbanists are also esperantists.
Esperanto was born more than one hundred years ago. It is the most
widely spoken artificial languages, and has a culture: books, poems;
peace also was a major force in the root project; (by the way, many
people were killed around the world during the last century for being
esperantists).
So no doubt that Esperanto is the language to go if you'd like to meet
people around the world, and speak directly with people with too many
different native languages for begin able to learn them all. Esperanto
has the largest community, by far.
Esperanto belongs to the family of "international languages" as
esperantists promote Esperanto as a universal secondary language for
culturally neutral international communications.
Lojban is a different project, it belongs to another family,
"engineered languages". Esperanto is built as a generalization of
natural languages, with much control to get an easy to learn and
regular grammar, and carefully designed way of building families of
words. Lojban is built from scratch, and its grammar is completely
different. So different that we don't use the terms "subject", "verb",
etc, but Lojban words for the grammar elements and assemblies. Lojban,
at its inception, was more a linguistic experiment. Now it is a usable
language. But again, compared to Esperanto, it has a very little number
of practitionners.
More on Esperanto vs. Lojban:
http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/lojbanmo.html#AEN475
An overview of Lojban grammar:
http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/overview.html
or http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter2.html.en
So, back to your question: we don't position Lojban as a competitor of
Esperanto.
And, now, I will speak for myself, i.e. the opinions below are my own,
not opinions that can be considered as being shared by the Lojban
community.
Politics:
1) Linguistics is politics
2) Europe needs a common language
3) This language can't be a national one
4) Therefore, although English (or degraded-English) is shared by many
politicians, scientists, etc, English can't be this international
language
5) Even if Esperanto is not the best designed articifical language, it
is the best candidate for an being THE international language, so let's
just pick this one if we agree with the political project.
Future:
6) Esperantists don't welcome criticism of Esperanto
7) The good thing is that it has maintained the integrity of the
language
8) Although Esperantists don't want to change the basic rules of
Esperanto grammar, it is not true that a language can't be reformed (it
has even been made for natural languages: Turkish, Hebrew, ...)
9) Esperanto becomes bloated by terms coming from natural languages,
with now multiple terms for the same concept in some case, and there
are discussion about what it means for a language to be "easy to
learn"; a well-known discussion (and rather old) on this subject is
here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=fr&lr=&ie=UT
-8&th=2c2c7b0408782706&seekm=199210180406.AA13458%40rand.org&frame=off
10) My opinion is that Esperanto needs some reform (even light and
progressive) - but - well-known joke - almost anybody has the same idea
after studying Esperanto a couple of hours :-)
11) If you want to reform Esperanto, you will have to become a great
esperantist before being able of proposing anything
12) The Lojban language may be a good source for ideas in reforming
Esperanto.
Fun:
13) I like Lojban because it is different. Esperanto looks like
european languages, and although the logic of its design is much
advertised, I didn't find it was that obvious.
14) Esperanto has actually become a natural language, Lojban is still a
kind of intellectual game.
15) But Lojban is much much more than a toy...
So, as a conclusion: don't pick just one among Esperanto and Lojban,
pick the two! If you are ready to learn two articial languages, these
are the best choice!
Jérôme -- France.
PS: I hope my English was understandable... From a French to a Swedish,
we should have had this conversation about Lojban in Esperanto, not in
English!
PPS: I still learn Lojban and Esperanto...
----- Forwarded message from bjorn.jansson@teacher.com -----
Subject: Web-Based Feedback
From: bjorn.jansson@teacher.com
To: secretary@lojban.org
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Delivery-date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 11:27:48 -0800
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Hello!
I would just like to know what separates lojban from other
artificial languages, let\'s say esperanto (that is the only AL I
know). On the Swedish version of the homepage I find 11 examples of
what makes this language uniqe. There\'s one word \"predicate
logic\" that I don\'t understand completely, but I think it means
that the predicate is always the main subject in each sentence.
Anyhow, no one of the other 10 examples make it clear to me, why I
should learn Lojban instead of Esperanto (or anyother of all those
artificall languages).
Thank you for your time!
Kind regards,
Björn Jansson - Sweden
----- End forwarded message -----