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paper-machine comments on Thinking Bayesianically, with Lojban - Less Wrong
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Comments (66)
While technically true, those 2000-some words combine in nontrivial and mostly arbitrary ways. The language is no toki pona. I think the proper comparison is with Mandarin; there one learns on the order of 4000 characters, which then combine in not-immediately-obvious ways.
The PEG that parses Lojban is the size of an X-Box. This claim is plainly false. There are more than 11 cmavo that substantially change the parsing of lojban in distinct ways.
Then suddenly,
These are all gismu places that have to be memorized, because there is no template rule for gismu referring to materials. While "there are no irregularities, no words that change arbitrarily" is technically true, there are also few regularities in the basic words (= gismu and cmavo) of the language. The situation is resoundingly worse once one starts forging lujvo.
I think the operating phrase here is "summarized," it is akin to the way you can write a human-readable book about english grammar even though the only known parser for it is the human brain. I have, specifically, viewed the Yacc code that can parse Lojban (with some clever use of error recovery) and it holds on the order of 600 rules. My point was that if you wrote a book on Lojban grammar it would have 11 chapters, each meticulously detailing a different category cmavo and their use, how to construct brivla, how to construct lujvo and some other things. Then you would only need that book, a slim dictionary and a pronunciation guide.
That is a very valid point, the amount of information is probably the same.
I claim there is no meaningful "summary" of Lojban that constrains itself to eleven "rules", each less than a typical paragraph in length. The reference grammar covers most of the language, taking arguably 18 or 19 chapters to do so. Most of those chapters cover distinct classes of words, to boot.
There is an ancient log that mentions 11 rules in it, but that is just that -- ancient history (circa 1988! A quarter of the LW population wasn't even alive then!). It doesn't even pretend to be a reasonable catalog of the language. Perhaps they've updated since then, but a swift Googling doesn't bring up anything more recent.
In summary, lojban is a hard language mixing the worst of incompressible memorization (e.g., gismu places, lujvo, fu'ivla), archaic logic/maths (e.g., mekso), and just straight-up bad design. I liked it precisely because it was challenging and fun to hack on. At the end of the day, a person wanting to learn a new language is better served by learning a common natlang.
Why do you consider it to be bad designed? What fault did it's creators make?
I believe the earlier comments in this thread make my position on this (which I share with myself from a year ago) clear.
Good point, I guess I hadn't researched the issue sufficiently.