JBO is a standard shortcut for Lojban. No, no, I am fine, thank you very much. However I am getting exposed to Lojban every day now.
You see, I work among a group of rather brilliant young gentlemen. Now, I am not ancient, but I am older than them, and boy, do I feel like a rather old-version sometimes.
So, a word about me. Russian is my mother's tongue. English is my second language which I can speak, read and write, though my accent is heavy and I lack spoken language practice. Finally, I speak fluent everyday Hebrew and I can slowly read. Don't ask me to write though. In principle I can, but I much rather not. So, I call myself two-and-a-half-lingual.
My coworkers are the same for the most part, though their Hebrew is way better than mine. So one would imagine that three pretty different languages are enough for flexing one's mind muscles every day. But you're wrong. They've taken up Lojban - the languages of rules, no exceptions and clear cut logic in everything, grammar and semantics alike.
To have lunch with this group of braniacs is really cool. You see, here in Israel it is kind of customary to mix all the languages one knows. So they would discuss Lojban in a sweet mixture of mostly Russian but with good measure of Hebrew and English spicing the meal, so to say.
This observation in fact, brings me to my first question. Do we have a person walking this Earth whose mother's tongue is synthetic language, be it Klingon, Esperanto or Lojban. Lojban is way more interesting here because it seems to me its concept is unlike any other language. So now, watching and hearing my mathematically endowed friends discuss Lojban I often wonder what it would be like to have Lojbanian (for lack of better term here) study English (the language of infinite hints within clues within double meanings, in my view at least) or Russian (with its amazingly intricate grammar).
I'd make a pause here, but rest assured that this Lojbanic theme with return to this blog...
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Do we have a person walking this Earth whose mother's tongue is synthetic language, be it Klingon, Esperanto or Lojban?
ReplyDeleteI can't speak for the other languages, but there definitely are people whose mother tongue is Esperanto, even if most Esperanto speakers today use it as a second language. I'm not sure I'd use the word "synthetic" for Esperanto, though, as it implies an artificiality that ill characterizes it. Unlike Klingon and Lojban, its inventor went for easy, natural and practical more than foreign and/or difficult. In the beginning, over 120 years ago, it was artificial enough, a drawing-board project with many gaps and rough edges. However, its inventor realized that for the his language to gain any traction, he had to let it go, which he did. It was then free to evolve into the complete, natural living language it is today, used in every imaginable circumstance, without giving up its ease of learning.
I'm very glad to see your interest in Lojban. Currently I think the only native speakers of an artificial language are Esperanto speakers. "In The Land Of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent includes the story of some of them, in her studies of several different artificial languages from the past few centuries.
ReplyDelete-Matt Arnold
aka "Eppcott"
President, Logical Language Group
Thank you Miĉjo and Matt for your kind comments. I am positively humbled by the fact that LogLan Group President himself paid attention to this most modest blog.
ReplyDeleteIt is in fact very fascinating to actually see if a language such as Lojban can be taught as a mother's tongue. My understanding (please correct me if I am wrong here) is that Esperanto is like any other regular language, with probably just a bit of simplification compared to older languages such as English or Spanish. Lojban is another matter entirely.