In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [81]
But people do speak it. Well, they sort of do. I saw this for myself when I attended Logfest (jbonunsla in Lojban), a gathering of about twelve computer guys (plus Nora) that took place in 2006. Bob and Nora had stopped hosting Logfest at their home a few years before, not because they were unwilling, but because, as Bob told me, “I think the newer members wanted something a little more formal than the accommodations we provided. They wanted to stay in a hotel, eat at restaurants, more of an official conference-type thing.” The Logfest I attended was held at Phil-con, “the [Philadelphia] region's premiere conference of Science Fiction and Fantasy.” We got bumped out of one and then another room we had been promised when it turned out that an author signing or panel discussion had already been scheduled for that space, and so we ended up crowded around a coffee table in the eighth-floor, end-of-hall suite that a few of the participants were sharing. This made it hard for interested newcomers to drop in and hear the presentations designed to entice them into joining the cause, so talks like “What Is Lojban?” and “Introductory Lojban Class” ended up being preached to the choir.
I was scheduled to give a talk on the history of invented languages (when I registered, the organizer discovered through my Web page that I was writing a book and invited me to give a presentation about it). I came armed with my own Lojban translation of Borges's quotation about the futility of classifying the universe, the one I had translated into Wilkins's language: “It is clear that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.” Studying Lojban had given me the same unsettling feeling that I had experienced deep within the thickets of Wilkins's tables—the sensation of being sucked into meaning quicksand, where the struggle for greater precision was not a lunge toward solid ground but a hopeless kicking and flailing that only pulled me in deeper.
But in Lojban it was worse. Not only did I have to pin down which translation I should use for content words like “clear,” “arbitrary,” and “reason” (is the best I can do for “arbitrary” really cunso—“x is random/fortuitous/unpredictable under conditions y, with probability distribution z”?); I also had to grapple with little function words like “the,” “and,” “of,” and “no”—words for which Wilkins had supplied straightforward substitutes.
Then I had to deal with syntax. Until Loglan, invented languages had never been very explicit about how sentences should be put together. In philosophical languages like Wilkins's, or symbol languages like Blissymbolics, once you had done the hard work of finding the appropriate concept words, you just arranged them in an English-Latin-type hybrid grammar. There was never a well-defined “correct” syntax for these languages. Esperanto developed a better-defined standard of proper sentence structure, but it came naturally through usage, and not because the inventor laid down the rules from the beginning. You don't learn the rules of Esperanto; you intuit them from examples. When speaking Esperanto, I could draw on my general familiarity with European languages and wing it pretty successfully.
There is no winging it in Lojban. The language has an exhaustively defined syntax, and it is completely unambiguous. One must clearly specify the structure of the sentence as a whole, using various markers that serve, in effect, as spoken parentheses. There can be no confusion, for example, between an “ancient (history teacher)” and an “(ancient history) teacher” in Lojban. When you say “I saw the man with the binoculars” in Lojban, you can leave no doubt as to whether you had the binoculars or the man did. Lojban sentences have only one structural parse.
So you have to make sure it's the one you really want. Composing a sentence in Lojban is like writing a line of computer code. Choose the wrong function, drop a variable, forget to close a parenthesis,