"angell.jared@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <angell.jared@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>I'm interest in learning a language as near to perfect as possible and
>from what I've been reading that is either Ido or Lojban. But I
>cannot find enough information about Ido to be sure if Lojban is
>better, which it seems it might be. It also seems like it would feel
>less human. Can anyone help me with this so I don't have to try to
>learn both???
Lojban is most certainly a human language, and when using it, one
feels no less human than using any other language. There is, however,
a large portion of the Lojban community that tend to strive for just
the right nuance of meaning in a way rather few speakers of other
languages try for. This is possibly because the language is so
different from English or most other languages in its basic structure
that one really has to think about what one is trying to say, rather
than merely to translate the words of another language.
This makes translation a good deal harder; it is simply too easy to
think that you can just substitute Lojban words, rearrange to fit a
funky grammatical order, and think that the translation works.
I don't know Ido, but from prior discussions, it is a
not-especially-major reform of Esperanto. It thus falls into the
category sometimes labeled as "Euroclones" because they also use more
or less the same European word-stock and grammatical categories and
terminology that are appropriate to western Indo-European languages.
This word stock makes the vocabulary somewhat easy to learn for a
European language speaker, but the languages aren't the least bit
"perfect" by the standards of non-European language native speakers
(they may be somewhat easier to learn for such non-Europeans, because
they tend to have few irregularities).
One chooses a Euroclone for ease of learning, and the likelihood of
finding others who can and will learn the language. But given those
goals, most would typically choose Esperanto because there are so many
more using that language than any other Euroclone. The improvements
that others see in other Euroclones don't outweigh the fact that far
fewer people know and use the them.
Lojban is easier to learn than natural languages, and one can reach a
low level of competence in the grammar relatively quickly.
The lexicon is harder to learn for a European language speaker than
that of a Euroclone, because its wordstock is NOT European (there are
some words that have apparent cognates, and the Lojban wordlists
include "keywords" that are not always definitional, which try to aid
cognate-recognition. Mastery of the unique subtleties of the language
takes a variable amount of time because of the need to abandon
language habits.
A large percentage of the Lojban community, but by no means all of it,
would fall into the general category of "computer nerds", and this may
skew the topics and styles of conversation. There is a tendency to
try to communicate on a post-college-graduate level of discussion
using a vocabulary mastery comparable to that a child has in the
natural languages. People try it anyway, and some are disappointed.
The Lojban community has become large and is mutually supportive in
learning the language. I just got statistical data (which someone
asked for a few months ago), and we have 457 people on our main email
list and 413 on our beginners list. There is some overlap, and many
people are just lurkers, but over 100 different people have posted
some 2000 posts so far this year. There is quite a lot of non-mailing
list activity, with a fair amount of IRC traffic (channel #lojban of
course), a few blogs, and changes to the wiki pages every day or two.
I cannot say that I have heard much of any significant Ido activity,
but I also haven't been looking.
lojbab
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