[stack] Lojban (was: cabbages and kings)

William Tanksley scripsit:

> Lojban is a constructed language that was designed "entirely" from
> scratch in order to be easily learned and unambiguous. One of the design
> choices was to make it easily parsed, and the implementor chose to make
> the language defined by an LL grammar. The result has been catastrophic:
> in spite of a reasonably strong community, not one person has EVER
> achieved fluency in lojban (according to the community-acclaimed best
> speaker).

All your facts are correct, but your inference is unsupported: there
is zero evidence that the LALR(1) grammar (which is only so if you
do some pre-aggregating of certain words) has anything to do with
the problems people have had in becoming fluent.  Fluency requires a
tightly interacting speaker community, and because Lojban materials
are available only in English, and Lojban users are scattered all over
the planet, it's hard to create that speaker community.  By contrast,
Esperanto-speakers came from all over Europe and often met face-to-face
with no common language but Esperanto.

I'm not in touch with it myself, but I understand there is a Skype
community chat now, with speakers at varying fluency levels.

-- 
How they ever reached any  conclusion at all    <[email protected]>
is starkly unknowable to the human mind.        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --"Backstage Lensman", Randall Garrett