[lojban] Re: How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?

["Matt Arnold" <matt.mattarn@gmail.com>]

Probably a half-dozen fluent speakers at a time, I'd guess. That's
vastly more successful than almost any other artificial language.
Other than, modern Hebrew, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, and a couple of
others, artificial languages never get even _one_ fluent speaker. If a
half-dozen speakers is considered a low number, that is not because
Lojban is bad, but because hardly anyone ever has any reason to want
to learn an artificial language.

Consider a Venn diagram with a circle of all the people who are
interested in artificial languages. There is a tiny circle nested
inside it, of all the people with the serious commitment to be able to
attain fluency in an artificial language. The serious, committed
circle is truly tiny. Most of that tiny circle is taken up by two
smaller circles: modern Hebrew and Esperanto. Hardly more than a half
dozen people are left over in the serious committed circle, and I'd
wager more of them learn Lojban than anything else.

I have no problem remembering sumti places because they're almost all
completely intuitive. When I set up flashcards to memorize each word,
I also set up flashcards to memorize the non-obvious sumti places that
surprised me. Remembering three sumti places in a word is the same
thing as remembering three words.

I wouldn't say Lojban is suitable for computers rather than humans,
but I would say that it can bridge the gap between them. It's
definitely more suitable for computers than any other language that
humans can speak.

- Eppcott


On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 7:52 AM, arpgme <lojban-out@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?
>
> Author: arpgme
>
> To me, Lojban seems too logical and non-natural for me to learn fluently.
>
> You have all of these words with "sumti" and if people use words like "fa,fe,fi" you are expected to know which "x" means what. I don't think the human brain can work like that, at least, not fluently.
>
> This language looks like something that should be used for computers and not humans.
>
> Do you have difficulties remembering all of these cmavo and sumti places?
>
> How many fluent speakers are there of Lojban?
>


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