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[lojban] the illogic of Lojban
Quoting Adam Shepley <akmshepley@gmail.com>:
...
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.
...
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.
The first time I studied Lojban, more than a decade ago, I was too shy
to say anything, being aware of the critical atmosphere in
Lojbanistan. The second time I studied Lojban I talked a bit, but I
was quickly scared off, not just by the negativity addressed at me,
but by the general air of confusion & contention hanging over so many
features of the language, which made me feel that it was unspeakable.
I left Lojban then for a long time, but it haunted me. Grammatical
features would float through my mind while I was showering. Words and
phrases that I hadn't actually studied or used for years or ever were
still hanging suspended in my mind, these unique shapes and structures
that belong nowhere but Lojban. In the end I discovered that I love
Lojban, and that my love of the language was strong enough to bring me
back to try to rescue it.
Now that I am more fluent in Lojban, I understand more clearly why it
presents itself so terribly to newcomers. I don't think the negative
atmosphere is necessary or inevitable, but I've gotten a sense for how
it develops. Consider that Lojban is perhaps the first truly
artificial language to be spoken by a community; Esperanto of course
cheated by resting most of its grammar and semantics on a European
foundation, but (on the level of grammar, at least) Lojban has truly
been built ground up from first principles, even with a bit of rigor.
For one thing, Lojban is a language so fantastically simple that it is
possible to hold its full deep structure in your mind; that's a
beautiful thing, but it also leads people to demand unreasonable sorts
of correctness from newbies, and to teach them in incomprehensible
unimmersive ways.
The main way I believe that Lojban's uniqueness makes it inhospitable,
though, is that it is still very unfinished. A few decades is a short
time in the life of a language, after all (though I do believe that
great progress has been made, even if it's not so apparent close up).
Newbies constantly innocently ask questions that raise unresolved
issues, even completely unexplored questions. This has historically
been a language-invention society, not a language-education society,
and naturally when interesting questions are raised people voice a
cacophony of opinions, but naturally it's offputting to a newbie if
what seems like a perfectly simple question (and what in a finished
language would be perfectly a simple question) cannot get a simple
answer. That's inescapable, though; many questions really cannot yet
be answered well or answered at all; Lojban's not done.
None of this excuses us as a community from overcoming such obstacles.
To me an obvious first step is to draw a bright line between
inward-facing language design (tinkering, experimentation,
exploration), and outward-facing simplification and education. That's
right, we should lower ourselves to the lie of simplification; don't
respond to a simple question with a list of exceptions. I believe
also that we ought to establish a taboo against unsolicited
corrections: if someone says "mi cilre la lojban." (I learn Lojban,
incorrectly phrased), we should say "mi gleki lo nu do cilre fi la
lojban." (I'm happy you're learning about Lojban), positive
reenforcement and providing a good model, not "Lojban can't be in the
second place of cilre! The second place of cilre is a fact that's
learned!", which is true but unhelpfully critical.
We should also work on creating explicit structures to help ease new
people into the language. One which seems like a nobrainer to me is
to indicate to newbies which words (for instance, which of the gismu)
to learn first, and then write & speak to newbies with a heavy
emphasis on those words. I've been working on creating that sort of
structure to help newbies into the language, and I've found it a
surprising amount of work. Still, it's a shame that such things
haven't been anyone's priority for so many years. It's only very
recently that we've even had rudimentary things like simple
illustrated books or vocabulary lists with pictures.
So I think it's important to recognize and respect the tremendous
amount of effort that's been put into Lojban over the years, while
also attending to some perspectives which have been very neglected. I
do believe that Lojban is changing, and is on the right course. I
also think it is still a long hard road ahead-- certainly a very long
road before Lojban is anywhere near as complete as a full natural
language. My love of Lojban gives me the strength to keep tugging it
along that long road, and to toss off the discouragements and
criticisms that arise from its complicated past.
...
The much commoner (if less "superior") paradigm for community access on the
internet is the web based forum.
There is, BTW, a perfectly active Lojban web forum:
http://community.livejournal.com/lojban/
There's been a trickle of activity there forever, and I don't know why
it's not taken seriously by the community. I'm an active Livejournal
user myself anyway, so I'm not really aware how hard it is to get an
account or whatever, is that the problem? Anyway I always follow that
group and I encourage anyone to stop by.
I don't expect these mailing lists to suddenly radically alter in
either their structure or their vibe. And why should they? They've
got a long-standing tradition, and they're not using up the whole
internet. It's about time that Lojbanistan was larger than a couple
of mailing lists, IMHO. If people would recognize the effort that's
been put into establishing the Lojban Livejournal community, and
consider it a real part of Lojbanistan, that would be a good start.
...
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.
Community is essential for more than just transmitting a language; it
is only in a community of speakers that a language exists. Lojban
existed at first as a specification for a language, not a living
language. There are innumerable ways in which communities could speak
Lojban which would match the specification, while still being mutually
incomprehensible!
There is a living Lojban today. It is still a baby language-- it
struggles and becomes as artificial & strained as it used to be if you
try to force it to say complicated sophisticated things-- but it's
used on IRC (the Freenode network, channel #lojban) every day
comfortably at a basic level of conversation. Organic explorations of
the language have begun to take place from inside. It's beautiful to
me to see the simplest things in Lojban, to see people play with the
shapes that expressions can take.
There's still a few missing links between newbies and that living
language which is just starting to emerge. I see newbies all the time
on IRC being told not to take any of the learning materials seriously
because they're all out of date! That must be pretty discouraging.
But I believe we are getting there; I believe that those last few
links can be forged, and Lojban can get the life it deserves.
...
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.
Don't bother rejoining the mailing list, if it bugs you. It's a sort
of language workshop, bits of grammar all over the cutting room floor,
and that's probably how it's going to stay. But join us on IRC or
Livejournal or the new Facebook groups or somewhere, won't you?
Lojbanistan is getting bigger lately, things are happening, and Lojban
is always developing.
mu'o mi'e la bret.
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