On 9/13/08, arpgme <lojban-out@lojban.org> wrote:
How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?
Define "fluent". There are perhaps a few dozen people who can have a comfortable conversation in Lojban. None of them are as fluent in Lojban as they are in their native languages, but I don't think that's even possible-- no one knows the Lojban words for "carburetor" or "lemon merengue pie", for instance, because there aren't any.
To me, Lojban seems too logical and non-natural for me to learn fluently.
Nah, it's just kind of strange at first. It honestly is simpler than a natural language. Imagine what you'd say if some conlanger had come up with Finnish or Chinese! (How many cases? You write every word with a different ideogram? I'm not learning your crazy language! :P)
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.
I'm not fluent in every gismu's obscure places, but there are definitely a lot of gismu that I'm fluent in the place structure of . Let's take "tavla". I know "tavla" like the back of my hand. The x1 is a speaker, a talker. The x2 is someone who's talked to, a listener (well, they probably don't have to be listening to be a selta'a, I guess). The x3 is a topic of conversation, something talked about. The x4 is a language in which something is spoken. I assure you that I don't have to think to recall those, and that I can fluently both read and create any rearrangement of them, such as "la .lojban. te tavla fi do" (Lojban is talked about by you.) or "mi tavla fo la .lojban." (I speak in Lojban.) or "la .lojban. cu cinri te tavla gi'e nandu ve tavla". (Lojban is an interesting subject of talk, and a difficult language for talk.) I can recognize or use the related lujvo "selta'a", "terta'a", and "velta'a". I could recognize effortlessly sentences that use those lujvo and also other places, like "lo cinri terta'a be fo la .lojban." (An interesting subject of Lojban conversation.) (Also consider that I can also almost as easily understand other lujvo ending in -ta'a, like "jbota'a": "mi jbota'a fi lo cinri" (I talked in Lojban about something interesting.), so learning a gismu is learning a whole slice of the language, not just a single word.)
The way that I know the places of gismu like "tavla" is indeed to know what the places are, and to recognize from the grammar what sumti is filling what place. I'm very used to various common rearrangements like "te broda fi", so I don't have to think much about what sumti is going where. But you should note that even if a place is unmarked (or incorrectly marked-- I've seen nintadni a number of times say "tavla fi" or "tavla fo" when they meant the other and understood), it's rarely very difficult to figure out what's going on. The gismu "tavla" has three trailing places: x2 which is usually a person, x3 which could be anything, and x4 which is a language. So if it's a language, it's probably the velta'a, and if it's a person, it's probably the selta'a, and if it's anything else then it's probably supposed to be the terta'a. (You don't have "lo nu do klama le zarci" (an event of your going to the market) as a selta'a.) That sort of typematching provides a lot of redundancy in Lojban in a lot of situations.
I don't think that the numbered places are harder to learn or use than the syntactic places of natural languages, they are just unusually sharply defined. English has prepositional places, for instance, and prepositions react in idiosyncratic and sometimes bizarre ways in relation to each verb. New students of English make frequent errors with arbitrary questions like which preposition to use, or whether a verb can take a direct object. These structural matters are no less arbitrary in natural language, and they are much less sharply defined, so on the whole Lojban is tremendously easier. Of course you must remember that learning all the quirks of a natural language takes many years, so tremendously easier than that is still quite hard!
This language looks like something that should be used for computers and not humans.
Semantically it's a very human language. It does have this property of having a certain kind of grammatical structure that's parseable, terminators and so forth. It does take a little getting used to. But it's certainly possible to become fluent in the use of terminators; I am. I may have to think consciously about the terminators in an especially tricky piece of prose, but I don't think twice about them in conversational sentences. You should note that not all of the capabilities of the language are fully explored in all ordinary conversation! A lot of talk in Lojban is formulaic, if not ritualistic. I was thrown the first time I saw the now-common well-wishing phrase "lo melbi ko li'i cerni" (Have a beautiful morning.), which uses interesting and (previously) lesser-explored parts of Lojban's grammar. Now that that phrase is common, I've seen more frequent use of the second place of "li'i" in general, so that's something that's helpful right now to understand IRC conversation (the x2 of li'i is the experiencer), but it was largely unknown a few weeks ago, as are plenty of other seeming complexities. It's a large toy with many parts, in other words, and it's not so hard to play with us if you know which ones we've been in the habit of using lately.
Do you have difficulties remembering all of these cmavo and sumti places?
I know at least half of the cmavo well-- I'm missing a lot of BAI, FAhA, and the math stuff. I know at least half of the gismu well, and I have at least some recognition of pretty much all of them. I mostly still only recognize the most common rafsi, though I've started making flashcards, so I'm more likely to recognize ones that start with "B". :) My vocabulary is sufficient for IRC, but I still generally have to look up at least a word/paragraph in prose (where there's lots of gismu used for physical objects and situations that don't come up as much in conversation).
How many fluent speakers are there of Lojban?