First impressions about Lojban (or Love at first sight)

A few days ago a friend of mine said something about some language called Lojban.  I was talking (or writing, on my Facebook wall) about how James Cameron’s Avatar language (na’vi) is actually artificial. My friend claimed that this language was much more interesting to us (Computer Science’s students) because “its grammar is bassed in predicate calculus!!!”.

With my friend Google, I found more info about this. First of all, the official Lojban Site. The design wasn’t really great… but some facts of this language were. I’ve selected the ones that moved me (copy-pasted from that page):

• Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
• Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
• Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
• Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
• Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
• Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
• Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
• Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.

Well… it wasn’t really a selection…

I’ve been always interested in learning another language. As you may have read in About me, I’m Argentinian, so English is my second language (sorry if you’ve already noticed that :s). German, French, Italian, Japanese… they all were interesting (and potentially useful) possibilities, but I couldn’t afford the amount of time to learn one.

So why would I start learning a language that very few people speaks? Well… first, I am really interested in artificial languages (I will get deeper in this in a future post); second, this particular one seems to have all I (and I think everyone too) wish in a language I’m starting to learn (all the points up there). And finally, they claim it’s easy to learn. I’ve read in a forum somewhere that an enthusiast learner was speaking Lojban very fluidly about 6 months after starting. That’s fast…

And what about this blog? Well, I intend to post my progresses in learning. They claim it’s easy, so I’ll be supposedly showing advances in no time. In a week, perhaps I could post here some of my first sentences…

In 3 months, translate a short story…

In 6 months, help the community developing a software…

In a year, be THE PRESIDENT OF LOJBANISTAN!!!!!! MUAJAJA…

…

Mmm… I’ve let myself be carried away by the emotion.

More seriously, this will be my journal of my adventure in this new territory, checking if it’s true is easy, hoping it will help other people who are interested too, and, even if I fail, help to make this language known.

Let’s get started!