Just yesterday, two other Lojibanists (@hatthin and @fotono) and I held a Lojban study group in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. We planned this group in the mailing list for a couple of weeks earlier, and this was the first time for us, and probably for any Lojibanist in Japan, to get together offline.
Since it was the first time, firstly we made clear our directions of the study group, deciding that the study group will start by reading the The Lojban Reference Grammar, a few chapters each time, taking turns. This document is basically the same one as the published book “The Complete Lojban Langauge,” and we may share the Japanese translation (or simpler handouts) online. Later we’ll probably start reading some easy Lojban text.
We also talked about various topics — it ranged from the difference between Lojban and Esperanto to the evolution of languages. I have to admit that I had never met such language-loving people. I had a wonderful time.
Among the topics we discussed, I’m personally interested in the differences between Esperanto and Lojban. I reflected over and over why I’m so attracted to Lojban, even though I have some experiences of studying Esperanto and personally like it pretty much, too. The most notable one is that the former is just “invented” by a single person, leaving a lot of arbitrariness, while the latter, based on logic and computer-generated gismu’s, leaves little room for change or improvement.
In other words, Esperanto is an invention, while Lojban is engineering.
The numerous “improvement proposals” to Esperanto never stop, since one cannot tell which ones are “better,” but Lojban, being a computer-generated, logical language, we are able to quantitatively tell “the best.” In that sense, Lojban is already a (almost) completed language.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder what will be the “killer applications” for Lojban, like the “pasporta servo” for Esperanto. Languages can be evaluated not only by their “completeness” by themselves but also by cultural assets that they possess, including the amount of speakers. There could be many possibilities — Lojban as an HCI language, the intermediate language for machine translation, world knowledge representation, etc. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we started something like “Pasporta Sevo in Lojban”?
