How did you discover Lojban?

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How did you discover Lojban?

This is an important question as it helps establish how the LLG are gaining members and can help them target new members better. It maybe a good idea to include the reasons why you choose to learn/participate-in-the-community Lojban?

Answers:

  • Yanis Batura:
    • I had been dreaming about a language with precise relations between words for a year. Suddenly, when browsing Wikipedia, I saw a link to Lojban version from the article about Genghis Khan. I wondered what a language Lojban could be, and that is how I am here  :)
  • Josh Wolfer:
    • I was having a discussion with friends about what the optimal ancillary language would be for global communications. As a native speaker of English, I find it to be horribly arbitrary and overly complicated. A friend told me that it would probably be Lojban or Esperanto.
    • I did some research on Lojban and was instantly fascinated. I really wanted to see how a logical and intentional language could work. The idea of someone / some people creating language from ground up, is brilliant.
  • la gleki:
    • I used to read popular articles on languages and got acquainted with Esperanto. I thought Esperanto was what I needed. But I wanted to look at other options and when found the description of Lojban (probably in the Wikipedia article) immediately felt that that was what I needed: logic, cultural neutrality, parseability by machines, the ability to emulate different languages like shown in the Wikipedia article, the presence of an active community. I never changed my opinion since then. Better languages might appear in future. But as of now and as of the features mentioned Lojban is the best.
    • Besides ... other languages are just boring :)
  • la mukti:
    • I first heard of Loglan in a science interest magazine in the '80s discussing artificial intelligence research. The scientists concerned were looking for ways to encode information without ambiguity. Lojban came up for me in 2012 or 2013 when I was researching alternatives to semantic triples for a knowledge representation software project: In particular, I was reading up on languages which took a different approach to the pervasive grammatical roles of "subject" and "object". I read about topic-prominent and ergative languages, and then I found lojban, which I recognized as an outgrowth of Loglan. I ordered a copy of The Complete Lojban Language, but it was at least a year before I began to put it to use.
  • Alex Richmond (TheSupernatural), August 29, 2014:
    • I had little interest in languages other than English until I took my first foreign language class (2008-2009, Spanish). I immediately fell in love with idea of communicating in a language other than the English I've used my whole life. As high school languages classes tend to be, the pace of the course was slow and I ended up learning ahead. Somewhere that school year, I discovered conlangs. I learned about all the big ones: Esperanto, Ido, Klingon, Interlingua, Toki Pona, and of course, our beloved Lojban. Esperanto appealed the most to me for a couple reasons: it was simple to learn and speak, and there's a very active community out there. I lost interest not long after, although I can't remember why. I've read a lot of criticisms of Esperanto and most of them are very valid, but I still think their community is what every other conlang aims to be.
    • Over the course of five years, I had a mild interest in Lojban. It had a lot of appeal to me, but there's also a very steep learning curve for someone who is proficient in neither linguistics nor computer science. I finally decided to seriously learn it this year.
  • mark.xafirkamp. 2014-12-26
    • I learned about Lojban about a month ago from an in-progress post-Singularity science fiction story called S.I., by someone known online as DataPacRat. However, I may have been briefly exposed to Lojban as a child. When I saw Logflash in Talk:Lojbanic Software, I recalled having ran an old DOS program of that name that I found on my parents' computer when I was a kid and thinking something like "What the heck? How is this logical? It's just gibberish!". The memory is somewhat dubious; I couldn't find Logflash in my archive of old programs they had on that computer, but when I made the archive I was more interested in copying games than in random unintelligible serious stuff.
    • At first, I was interested in Lojban as a language that I could finally express and organize my thoughts clearly, without having to fight with the language. After a month of thinking about it, I think that Lojban is also the best human language to teach a computer to bootstrap a human-level AI.
  • 4D enthusiast (talk) 09:52, 24 December 2016 (PST)
    • I saw it mentioned on xkcd, but didn't think much about it at the time. A while later I was thinking about something I don't remember (probably to do with French lessons), and decided it would be worth looking into more.
  • Mavavilj 2022-09-20
    • I've for many years come across individually to the language philosophical problems of having many languages, having irregular languages and having hard time with computer-parseability. I've designed my own language philosophical perspectives that have sided with views such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analytical_Language_of_John_Wilkins and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratylus_(dialogue). I have been strongly impressed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage, which has confirmed to me that there's something very wrong with natural languages. In essence I believe that natural languages are not created by informed people. That is why I became interested in "expert languages". I cannot stand things like irregular pronunciation of English or arbitrary das/der/die in German. I have been strongly influenced by Mandarin in how it resembles very practical ideas about language, rather than arbitrary syntax mess that many western languages are. I hope more people would understand how much easier life would become if we put conscious effort into making better languages. No need to learn many languages, no need to hate NLP, no need to waste time on language lessons, ...