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Re: Lojvan, Logvan, Henry A. Wallace, cults, and gurus

At 12:42 PM 12/15/2000 -0500, Gene Ledbetter wrote:

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000 17:57:00 -0500 "T. Peter Park" <tpeterpark@erols.com>
writes:

>ju'i lobypli! coi lojbab.! coi pendo!
>Greetings cyberfriends!
>Many of us are familiar with Lojban ("Logical Language") as the name of
>a constructed language, and with "Loglan" as the name of a predecessor
>of Lojban.

I checked Lojban out by going to the Lojban home page. I see that it's in
an early stage of development and that so far there is only one fluent
speaker of the language. (That's the guy over in the corner talking to
himself.)
Having that "lone fluent speaker" sitting beside me, he corrects me and says that there is at least one other person as fluent as him (that I did not know was fluent).
In any event, lack of fluency does NOT come from the language being difficult, but rather because so seldom do Lojbanists get together in the flesh (as opposed to online communications) that few have had sufficient chance to practice speaking the language to reasonably expect to speak fluently.
In point of fact there are several people who are about as skilled in the language as that fluent speaker, and who have demonstrated that skill in translation and/or email conversation and/or IRC chats. I myself can converse in the language fairly easily, but not fluently - but then I have never spoken ANY of the three other foreign languages that I have studied fluently, so I am a poor specimen to judge the ability to learn the language.
In short, we have claimed a limited number of fluent speakers primarily because we have a high standard for demonstrating fluency and not that many people get the chance to prove it. There is no doubt that people can converse in Lojban fairly easily - we do so every year at our annual gathering. 


One mistake that Esperantists make is the claim that Esperanto is so easy
that anybody can learn it. I recommend to Lojbanists that they promote
Lojban as being so incredibly difficult that only the very intelligent
can learn it. You get no end of people trying to learn Lojban and at
least pretending fluency in it.


That is precisely what we DON'T do.

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org