Template:Today's featured article/oktobero, 2014

How did you discover Lojban?

Answers:

• 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.

• 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.

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