In the Land of Invented Languages

And oh, how grateful I am. Do you know how good we have it, how much easier our speaking lives are made by the fact that language and logic part ways? Consider the word “and.” Why, you barely have to know what you mean when you say it! When you say you “like ham and eggs,” do you have to specify whether you like each of those things as evaluated on its own merits separately or whether you like them served together as an entree? No. You just lazily throw out your “and” and let context do the rest of the work for you. When you say you “woke up and ate breakfast,” do you mean that you woke up first and then ate breakfast? Or did you do the two things simultaneously? Or maybe your breakfast was asleep, so you woke it up and then ate it. Pshaw, you say. You know what I mean. Perhaps I do, says the Lojbanist. Perhaps I don’t.

There are many ways to say “and” in Lojban. If you use the word .e in the following sentence (the stands for a slight pause):

la djan.e la alis. pu bevri le pipno “John and Alice carried the piano.”

 

you assert two propositions: “John carried the piano” and “Alice carried the piano.” Maybe they took turns. Maybe one of them did it in 1963 and the other one did it yesterday. But this sentence does not apply to the situation where John and Alice carried the piano together. For that you would use joi:

la djan. joi la alis. pu bevri le pipno “John and Alice (as mass entity) carried the piano.”

 

You would be wrong to use joi, however, if you wanted to say, “John and Alice are friends.” For that situation you must use jo’u:

la djan. jo’u la alis. pendo “John and Alice (considered jointly) are friends.”

 

If you used joi here, you would have said John and Alice massed together form some kind of friend entity. If you used e, you would have said that John is a friend (of someone) and Alice is a friend (of someone), and maybe they don’t even know each other.

There are at least twenty ways to say “and” in Lojban. But that’s nothing compared with what happens when you get into “or” and “if.” Even if you master the many, many rules pertaining to those little words, you’ve still barely begun to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg that is Lojban.

Frankly, the thought of trying to capture Lojban in a nutshell for you—something I have tried to do with the languages I’ve discussed in previous chapters—fills me with despair. There is just so much. The language is specified to within an inch of its life. The reference grammar comes to over six hundred pages. This doesn’t even include a dictionary.

I read the whole thing—I swear I did. And I’ll tell you, not only did I still not speak Lojban, but I started to lose my ability to comprehend English.

“How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light.” The further I waded into Lojban, the more everything I heard seemed to be filtered through the sensibilities of a bratty, literal-minded eight- year-old—“You love birthday cake? Well, why don’t you marry it?” “Can you use the bathroom? I don’t know, can you?”—with the difference that while the eight-year-old knows what you really mean, my lapses of understanding were genuine. One day during my weeklong immersion in the Lojban grammar, I was watching an Elmo video with my son when a friendly puppet character popped up to ask, “What are the two numbers that come after the number 6?” I had no idea what this puppet was getting at. “What the hell does she mean?” I wondered. “There are an infinite number of numbers that come after the number 6.” I honestly did not know what the answer was supposed to be until the video told me (it’s 7 and 8, by the way).

Was this some kind of Whorfian effect? Well, no. It was more of a Freudian effect—like when you read a little Freud and suddenly everything starts to look like a penis. If someone keeps calling your attention to hidden meanings, or distinctions in meanings, you may start to see them. Your view of the world can be shaped by lots of things, but the Whorfian hypothesis wants only to know which parts are shaped by the language you speak. And I did not speak Lojban. In fact, after reading the grammar, I was pretty sure it was impossible for anyone to speak it.

But people do speak it. Well, they sort of do. I saw this for myself when I attended Logfest (jbonunsla in Lojban), a gathering of about twelve computer guys (plus Nora) that took place in 2006. Bob and Nora had stopped hosting Logfest at their home a few years before, not because they were unwilling, but because, as Bob told me, “I think the newer members wanted something a little more formal than the accommodations we provided. They wanted to stay in a hotel, eat at restaurants, more of an official conference-type thing.” The Logfest I attended was held at Phil-con, “the [Philadelphia] region’s premiere conference of Science Fiction and Fantasy.” We got bumped out of one and then another room we had been promised when it turned out that an author signing or panel discussion had already been scheduled for that space, and so we ended up crowded around a coffee table in the eighth-floor, end-of-hall suite that a few of the participants were sharing. This made it hard for interested newcomers to drop in and hear the presentations designed to entice them into joining the cause, so talks like “What Is Lojban?” and “Introductory Lojban Class” ended up being preached to the choir.

I was scheduled to give a talk on the history of invented languages (when I registered, the organizer discovered through my Web page that I was writing a book and invited me to give a presentation about it). I came armed with my own Lojban translation of Borges’s quotation about the futility of classifying the universe, the one I had translated into Wilkins’s language: “It is clear that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.” Studying Lojban had given me the same unsettling feeling that I had experienced deep within the thickets of Wilkins’s tables—the sensation of being sucked into meaning quicksand, where the struggle for greater precision was not a lunge toward solid ground but a hopeless kicking and flailing that only pulled me in deeper.

But in Lojban it was worse. Not only did I have to pin down which translation I should use for content words like “clear,” “arbitrary,” and “reason” (is the best I can do for “arbitrary” really cunso—“x is random/fortuitous/unpredictable under conditions y, with probability distribution z”?); I also had to grapple with little function words like “the,” “and,” “of,” and “no”—words for which Wilkins had supplied straightforward substitutes.

Then I had to deal with syntax. Until Loglan, invented languages had never been very explicit about how sentences should be put together. In philosophical languages like Wilkins’s, or symbol languages like Blissymbolics, once you had done the hard work of finding the appropriate concept words, you just arranged them in an English- Latin-type hybrid grammar. There was never a well-defined “correct” syntax for these languages. Esperanto developed a better-defined standard of proper sentence structure, but it came naturally through usage, and not because the inventor laid down the rules from the beginning. You don’t learn the rules of Esperanto; you intuit them from examples. When speaking Esperanto, I could draw on my general familiarity with European languages and wing it pretty successfully.

There is no winging it in Lojban. The language has an exhaustively defined syntax, and it is completely unambiguous. One must clearly specify the structure of the sentence as a whole, using various markers that serve, in effect, as spoken parentheses. There can be no confusion, for example, between an “ancient (history teacher)” and an “(ancient history) teacher” in Lojban. When you say “I saw the man with the binoculars” in Lojban, you can leave no doubt as to whether you had the binoculars or the man did. Lojban sentences have only one structural parse.

So you have to make sure it’s the one you really want. Composing a sentence in Lojban is like writing a