I had a lot of fun in the lojban community back around 2003 - 2010. I attended a few jbonunsla, and that community is where I made the professional connections that lead to me moving to the Bay Area.<p>During a recent conversation, I realized that a lot of the community dysfunction there is the typical contrarian trap: If you're doing something sufficiently unusual, the vast majority of the people who show up to work on it with you are going to be extremely opinionated contrarians more-interested in personal experimentation than in working to make something solid and accessible to a general audience, and not particularly interested in cooperating or otherwise working together. Most of the people who are interested in pragmatic applications are going to just use something already widely used. The lojban community, when I was active in it, had a huge variety of interesting ideas that nobody was ever following up on or implementing, and the big projects people agreed were important (completing a document standardizing a new version of the language) languished. There were pretty regularly complaints about the community infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing list) that were answered with "If you're passionate about this, please feel free to fix it, or take over running it yourself. I want to hand these off and stop being the only responsible person. I'll give you commit access, root access on the servers, etc." that were almost never actually accepted.<p>So, basically like almost every open-source project out there. ;)
I love utopian language communities. I finished out the Duolingo Esperanto course. And of course, a Lojbanist would tell you that Esperanto is too Euro-centric to be truly international, and not nearly as linguistically precise as Lojban.<p>In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.
Yes, was just explaining this to a colleague this morning. I tried to learn some Lojban.. was a good experience. I like that sentences start with a dot and capitals are thrown out. I even registered a lojban word domain name.
Some noteworthy bits:
* Vitalik Buterin reads/writes Lojban long before he started Ethereum
<a href="https://bitcointalk.to/index.php?topic=21007.msg%msg_id%" rel="nofollow">https://bitcointalk.to/index.php?topic=21007.msg%msg_id%</a>
* Ben Goertzel of AGI fame dabbled in Lojban but decided on an English hybrid to skip learning the vocabulary but keeping the grammar
<a href="http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm</a><p>I've some good Esperanto books I chew on and lately I've been looking into Elefen and Ikthuil.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4034b" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4...</a>
I took classes from lojbab when I was 16 or so waaay back in the 90s in Vienna. It seemed like a cool techie thing to do for a college freshman.<p>Now and then I look into it, where it is, etc. One thing I could not get past was that the language is ugly. It’s very hard on the ears - I say this speaking English, Japanese, and some Spanish and have taken a few years of Mandarin, so perhaps it’s a taste thing, but I’ve heard lots of people say this over the years and I agree with it.
It only takes a day to learn the basics: <a href="https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda" rel="nofollow">https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda</a>
Anyone with an interest in the story of Lojban and a dozen other fascinating conlangs (constructed languages) should read "In the Land of Invented Languages". It's a terrific collection of tales of bizarre ego, hubris, and profound misunderstandings of how human ("natural") languages actually function in reality.
I love Lojban from the point of view of "eliminate ambiguity as a language feature", but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd. It also makes reading somewhat more difficult from anyone who uses a Latin character set and english-alike sentence structures (IMO, a single 100 level linguistics course does not make me an expert)