Re: New to lojban, any suggestions?

[Nick NICHOLAS <nicholas@uci.edu>]

> Welcome!

I second that. :-)

> > systematic study of the language.  But, at the same time, I've also
> > been fooling around with Esperanto, so I have a few questions to help
> > me to decide which constructed language to buckle down with for
> > awhile:

Because of residual guilt over no longer being an active Esperantist, I
have to do the "Jewish approach to conversion" thing, at the risk of
tainting myself:

The two language communities are exceedingly different. If you spend your
time in Esperantio, you are dealing with a well-established language,
whose design is complete, and where debates on language are closer to the
simmering-but-quiet level of, say, Hebrew. You'll get people who will
"never yield, never surrender" on whether to call a computer komputero or
komputilo; but that's nothing compared to what goes on here. You get a
solid body of literature, a distinct if nebulous ideology, and fair to
good paedagogical tools. You also get a community in the hundreds of
thousands of language users.

With Lojban, you get something much more interesting from the point of
view of language in the abstract. (Esperanto is certainly not
*un*intersting; but it doesn't tilt at windmills as gloriously as Lojban
does.) It's not a done language like Esperanto
is; but then again, it holds itself to much higher standards than
Esperanto does, and the equivalent of Zamenhofian precedent is not
going to work as settling issues in this language design. The community is
numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds of thousands. There is no
distinct ideological base, though there are common tendencies and quirks.
The paedagogical stuff is incipient (I should know --- I'm involved in
writing it, and any comments you might have on the lessons are earnestly
solicited. :-) That URL once again:
http://www.opoudjis.net/lojbanbrochure)

You sign up to the two languages for different reasons. With Klingon, it's
different again: a well-defined mythos, which gives you the ideology, but
the challenge of working with linguistically limited and alien tools
(unlike Lojban), which however do not take massive effort to master
(whether or not that's unlike Lojban is not for me to say publically. :-)
With Elvish, it's different again, as you get the added constraint of
perforce incomplete language definition.

Nothing's to say you can't spend time in more than one camp, of course,
and many here have done so. If
you have to pick one, Esperanto and Lojban are indeed about very different
things.

> > Can anyone share there stories of learning Lojban, how far they are
> > at, and how they enjoy it?

I'm surprised more people haven't jumped on this one. Lojban is immensely
rewarding, and also immensely frustrating. It feels great when you boil
down a concept to its regularised, logical expression, with explicit
arguments and structure. It's also frustrating when you find out a
construct doesn't do what you thought, or when you've forgotten a detail
of language lawyering. But if you care about language in the abstract,
Lojban can teach you a lot, and I am very grateful for it. (It really is
what made me a linguist --- even if the linguistics I ended up doing has
very little to do with it...)

> > Does any one have any good suggestions for how best to study it?
> > I've already gone through most of the basic grammar stuff, it's more
> > an issue of learning vocabulary.

I have been told I have a good vocab. Not good enough by my own standards,
but whatever. What I did was translate lots; I had fun, and the vocab just
stuck. This may not work for everybody...

> Roll around the Lojban webring and visit all the sites. The Lojban Wiki is
> updated daily. The most timely information is here on this mailing list &
> on that Wiki.

Hopefully, the situation with lojban.org will be fixed soon.

> As far as I know, there are probably a dozen who can hold a halting verbal
> conversation in it.

There's two I know to have held a fluent conversation in it: me and Goran
Topic. (We held it. I'm going to be reunited with my tape recording of it
soon, and am curious to see if my recollection of it is as good as I've
made it out to be.)

I myself don't have the perseverence to hold an extended Lojban
conversation, particularly because I can't slow down (as people will have
found at last Logfest.) My experience, though, was pretty much the same as
with the very few times I've held a conversation in Klingon (in
particular, with Robyn Stewart in Vancouver, and with d'Armand Speers
after the last qep'a' in Philly. Not that the names mean anything to
you.) The story is, speaking both conversationally is hard, especially if
you want to be purist and
avoid lapsing into English or borrowing words. (How the hell I managed to
explain deixis to d'Armand in *Klingon*, I still don't know.) John Cowan
was amused to see how tense my facial muscles had gotten as I was trying
to speak. The thing about Lojban is, you've got to hold a fair bit of
state if you want to speak it full-blown, with nesting structures and the
rest. It demands concentration. It's not at all intractable, but it is
work. (With Klingon, OTOH, you don't even bother with the grammatical
structures; the language just won't tolerate that much complexity. It's
the paucity of vocab that does you in.)

> are learning steadily, and perhaps another dozen can barely read or write
> but love to discuss it endlessly.

Eh, mi curmi fi mi felenu mi sitna lo drata ke slabu ke xelso ke tcaci
jufra po'u lu .i da srana le zdani na.anai .ei le gubni li'u ...

Right, that's enough treason for one night. :-)

-- 
==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==  ==
Nick Nicholas, Breathing  {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
nicholas@uci.edu                   -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias