paper-machine comments on Thinking Bayesianically, with Lojban - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (66)
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.