Long time ago…

Just in case you didn’t notice, in my last post I did a little edition…

While I still hadn’t decided to start learning, I read some interesting facts and some of the history of lojban. I think most of my usual readers (I can’t stop thanking you!) know this facts, but I’d like to write a little post about it.

Lojban it’s about 50 years old. It was first called Loglan, and described by Dr. James Cooke Brown. It was first “conceived as a means to examine the influence of language on the speaker’s thought (an assumption known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)” (extracted from the wiki — I’m going to get deeper in that hypothesis in a future post). Brown started to claim copyright, but some of the loglanist weren’t happy with this, so they separated and started a new project, Lojban, and formed the Logical Language Group (LLG).

Lojban had the basis grammar of Loglan, but different vocabulary. And all it’s grammar and vocabulary it’s open for everyone who wants to take a look .

About 1997, the language was baselined and frozen; The Complete Lojban Language was publicated, in order to let the number of speakers grow. This “freeze” expired in 2002, so the lojbanist now can construct new words (as long as they follow the rules) that can and might be added to the Lojban dictionary.

There are lots of projects under development, e.g. a text-book for new students (and teachers). And I think I’ve read somewhere that the language it’s going to be frozen again…

And about my learning process… a few comments:

• I started to read some lessons that are under development (in a wave) that timos recommended. As he said, it’s a little bit crude, but really useful too.
• I entered the IRC channel (#lojban and ##ckule on irc.freenode.net) and I’ve registered leom as my nick (leos was taken ). So if you see me online, I would love if we could chat!
• I’ll be away for a week more or less. I’m traveling to a really beautiful place called San Martin de los Andes (in Argentina, obviously ), so wish me luck!

Gathering material

As you may have realized, there isn’t much material to start learning lojban. So I’m going to gather as much as I can, and dump it here.

Most of it it’s the official page. However, I found a nice community around the language, and encouraging you to ask all you need.

In the introductory page, the LLG (Logical Language Group) invites us to ask them printed books, as well as to immerse in all the “collected Web and file archives [that] contain all information that we have in distributable form“. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Moreover, googling I found another pages with interesting links:

• http://jwodder.freeshell.org/lojban/tutci.html
• http://lojban.wikidot.com/links (this last one under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License)

From all this, I found really useful until now, the following books:

• I started reading “What is Lojban?“. It can be found on-line, you can purchase it, or download it (in PDF or other formats here)
• “Lojban for beginners“. This one is a softer one (and the one I’m reading right now). I found it here, and another version a little bit more beautiful here (they seem to be the same one). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

From the first one, I read some chapters. It is useful as a theoretical framework, but lacks of vocabulary and exercises to practice.

And that last two are what “Lojban for beginners” is all about. It isn’t really “serious“, and they say it’s an incomplete guide… but it’s a great place to start .

In the next post I’ll be talking about my progresses. I’m not going as fast as I’d like, but in part is because of this blog .