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Re: [lojban] Comparison to Ilaksh?
Robert LeChevalier, On 06/05/2010 04:37:
But Ilaksh's inventor seems to make no claims at all related to Lojban,
and I have no reason to believe he ever heard of Lojban.
He has heard of Lojban. Lojban is well-known, as is his widely-admired Ithkuil/Ilaksh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban#Comparison_with_other_logical_languages
Where is there a claim that Ilaksh is a "logical language"?
The word "rational" is used somewhere in the description, but the way it
is used, it seems merely to mean "designed" and tries to follow rules,
not that it has anything to do with "logic" per se. Most artificial
languages are "rational" in that sense, but relatively few are claimed
to be "logical".
What Lojban and Ithkuil/Ilaksh have in common is that they are the two most fully elaborated/documented/specified published engelangs, so two of the most impressive achievements in the world of invented languages.
As for how they differ:
* Lojban was developed piecemeal, by committee, and generally satisfied itself with the rule of thumb that "barely good enough is good enough (because then you can get on with building the user-community)", whereas Ilaksh had a single inventor and a single overarching integrated design and aimed for optimal solutions to its design goals.
* Considered as pure language designs, Ithkuil/Ilaksh is more impressive than Lojban. Lojban makes virtually everybody who encounters it feel they could improve on it, whereas nobody thinks that with Ithkuil/Ilaksh, which simply inspires awe. However, Lojban stands out as a virtually unique example of a language invented by a large team of very thoughtful people; and after Esperanto, it probably has easily the largest community of active supporters, setting aside languages like Klingon and Na'vi that draw on a larger fanbase and are commercially promoted.
* Lojban aimed to be human-speakable and to acquire a speech community. Ithkuil did not aim to be usable by humans in real-time. Ilaksh is less phonetically daunting than Ithkuil, but still does not aim to be usable by humans in real-time. Neither Ithkuil nor Ilaksh was designed with the aim of acquiring a speech community, though their excellence has nevertheless attracted to Ilaksh a user/learner-community, I believe.
* Lojban aimed to be able to be logically unambiguous, and to some extent tried to be culturally neutral and minimalist in the semantic categories it imposes on the world-view of its users. Ithkuil/Ilaksh was designed from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective, which doesn't make much of a song and dance about predicate logic; and absolutely fundamental to its design are immensely elaborate and highly specified multiple semantic taxonomies it imposes on the world-view of its speakers. By encoding these taxonomies morphologically in ingeniously concise ways, Ithkuil/Ilaksh allows for the expression of extraordinarily rich meanings in extraordinarily compressed forms.
--And.
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