The other day, Matt Arnold, a supporter of the planned language Lojban, reposted a message from Yanis Batura, another supporter of Lojban, here. Batura's message includes, among other things, the following observations:
The next year will be the 10th anniversary of the fundamental Lojban publication, The Complete Lojban Language (1). At present, still, there are no speakers in the world capable of fluent communicating in the language at advanced level in real time — without wordlists and saying ... ("uh") every thrice in a while.Why is it so? Why can't people get to this level as it is with other languages (natural and constructed, like Esperanto)?
It is obvious that something is missing in our Lojban universe that could help solving this problem. Yes — problem (not having fluent speakers is a problem for a famous language with a long history and an incredible amount of efforts by many supporters).
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Besides, speaking practice (a critical requirement in mastering of spoken Lojban) is now only a dream for beginners. Why? Because there are no Lojban speakers. :) This restriction could have got eased by supplementary multimedia materials — if they had been.
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Mastering Lojban requires a lot of work. It requires making tons of exercises, most of which are rather hard.
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Lojban, which grew out of a schismatic variant of Loglan once known as Loglan-88, has been available to wannabe learners for a decade and a half now. Loglan, its elder sibling, suffers from a similar lack of fluent speakers, for which lack a somewhat different explanation was offered some years ago, by Brown, Burson, Handley, Kennaway, and McIvor in their article "An Unambiguous Grammar for Loglan, a Speakable Language", which appeared in the Loglanist occasional journal (primarily in English) La Logli 1996/1; p. 72, footnote 2.:
...because of the low geographic density of the loglaphone population, no true speech-communities have formed; so there are still no fluent speakers of the language ...
Batura mentions Esperanto, which I learned to speak (fluently) in the complete absence of multimedia supplements, tons of hard exercises (besides those I set for myself, of course) and any supporting speech community. The first fluent speakers of Esperanto had only "Dr. Esperanto"'s little booklet (originally in Russian, though it was later translated into a number of other languages) which today is conveniently known as the "Unua Libro". The "Unua Libro", published in 1887, also lacked multimedia supplements and tons of hard exercises; it consisted primarily of an explanation of the philosophy behind the language, a set of grammatical rules, a fold-out word-list, and a couple of pages of short samples of the language. There were also (pretty obviously!) no supporting speech communities at that time, and even today the Esperanto speech community exists only in diasporà, which I suspect is not what Brown et al. were talking about.
No, I really think that if proponents of Loglan or Lojban want to find a genuine explanation for why today, years after the languages first appeared, there are no fluent speakers, they are going to have to look elsewhere.
Thanks for posting about this. You may be interested in my follow-up post to the same blog, titled "Does Speaking Effortlessly Require More Than Self-Teaching?"
First of all, one of Yanis' premises is incorrect. There are fluent speakers of Lojban. They were self-taught and did not have any more advantages than you had. They include Nick Nicholas, Robin Lee Powell, and Jorge Llambias. There are many others whose thorough command of the vocabulary and grammar allows them to compose most utterances in Lojban without assistance, but cannot do so at the speed of thought, and that expertise could be referred to as a type of fluency. The problem for language acquisition in the general population is that thinking in a second language can be achieved by self-teaching only by those who are exceptionally gifted.
Esperanto is also easier than Lojban for those whose first language is European.
Regarding your footnote: The Complete Lojban Language by John W. Cowan is available directly from www.lojban.org for $39.95 plus shipping and handling.
Regarding Loglan: The intellectual property rightsholders of Loglan (the parent language of Lojban) have a history of prosecuting those who speak or use it. Loglan activity has moved to Lojban, and the original language is so moribund as to be permanently relegated to history. These are disincentives for work toward proficiency in Loglan, which should be sufficient explanation in itself.
Posted by: Matt Arnold at November 30, 2006 10:05 AMYour article is very informative and helped me further.
Thanks, David
Matt -- Thanks for your long comment.
I knew -- from an earlier comment by Bob LeChevalier in another venue -- that Nick Nicholas was capable of speaking Lojban fluently, at least under certain conditions; but to say that he had no more advantages than I had is perhaps not quite correct. I started learning Esperanto about the same time I started learning Latin in high school, so I had no prior linguistic training; Nick, on the other hand, was, as far as I know, a professional (university-teaching-level) linguist at the time he learned Lojban, as well as being familiar with several other planned languages. He was, as a younger man, the Secretary of the Australian Esperanto Youth organization, and has written original poetry in the language -- you can find a 73-page collection of his poetry, "Najlonkorda Liro", in PDF format, at http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Poems/najlonkorda.pdf . I've been told that he is also the individual who translated Shakespeare's "Hamlet" into Klingon, in which he is also conversant. As well, he has translated poetry into Lojban, including some from Esperanto. I'm not familiar with Robin Powell, but Jorge Llambias is a long-time Esperanto speaker who was one of the team that translated Harry Harrison's "A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born" (published by Sezonoj in Russia and now sold out; as far as I know, the first cooperative effort, using the internet, to translate a book from one language into another) into Esperanto.
Esperanto also seems to be easier for those whose first language is not European; hence the very large and growing numbers of competent Esperanto speakers in places like e.g. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Burundi, Malawi, Nigeria, Togoland, Cote d'Ivoire, Madagascar, Nepal, Mongolia, etc. One of my favorite Esperanto "magazines" (actually a netzine) is "La amikeco", published by a team of young Asian Esperanto speakers from four different countries (also one token European); those interested can find the latest issue, a subscription button, and links to back issues, at http://www.la-amikeco.net/ .
Nice to see that Cowan's book remains generally available. I'm a bit surprised by the price, however. Bertil Wennergren's "Plena manlibro de Esperanta gramatiko" (Complete Handbook of Esperanto Grammar), published and printed in the U.S. at the end of last year, is bound, has approximately 700 pages, and goes for $27.00, which allows for a hefty profit to the publisher (the Esperanto League for North America, Inc.). David Richardson's "Esperanto -- Learning and Using the International Language", also bound, 368 pages long (of which a little over 100 pages are a course and a somewhat longer section consists of annotated reading material), goes for $15.00, which also permits a nice profit.
(The $97.10 price for Cowan at Amazon.com is not terribly surprising; marketplace sellers will demand all that the traffic will bear, and often overestimate that amount. A couple of months ago I saw somebody offering a copy of John Wells's "Esperanto Dictionary", a paperback, for almost $2000.00. The book quickly disappeared, but I suspect that it was withdrawn rather than sold at that price ...)
I'm aware of the Loglan/Lojban history, and the lack of development of any proficient speakers since Prof. Brown's demise a few years ago is not terribly surprising; the salient point is that, as far as I know, no proficient speakers developed before Brown's death, during a thirty-year period of public availability of the language. And, since Loglan and Lojban are not structurally that different ...