In conlang (constructed language) communities, Esperanto is a type of conlang known as an auxlang (auxillary language) that tries to be easily learnable and speakable by many people. Esperanto remains very popular and has tons of high quality learning material (I myself learned it from a book in my local community college public library over a few hours in between summer classes) and translated works.
That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.
For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language.
Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis.
bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.
> In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother").
Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother.
i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.
Like some other languages, one of the two is both specifically male in some contexts, and generic in others (which is why vir- exists, to clear up confusion in otherwise-generic contexts). English even retains some irregular words of this sort, such as dog vs. bitch, where dog is male in contexts where gender matters, but bitch is female in all contexts (at least when it comes to dogs).
Only one gender can get the shorter prefix, and there are only so many vowels (many people say that Esperanto already has too many vowels). Real surviving cultures aren't so petty that they'd make all their words longer by two characters for the sake of "fairness".
As for -in* being two extra characters for explicit-feminine, it's just something you trade for regular conjugation with such restricted phonotactics.
Now, you could make the argument to ditch grammatical gender altogether, and I'd probably be on board with that. In most cases it does not shorten or clarify sentences.
"vir-" is a preëxisting masculating prefix. I would read patrulo as "A fatherly person", rather than a parent, as "-ul-" turns an adjective into a person embodying that adjective.
(ge- is the neuterizing prefix, but in my extremely limited dabbling, it's mostly seen in plurals: gepatroj for parents, but for a single parent, one generally says patro for father and patrino for mother.)
Thank you for the quick overview.
I also got interested in Lojban. I am trying to incorporate the learning of the language in to some of my routines.
For example, for software projects, where I can, I use Lojban named classes, functions, test strings (instead of 'lorem ... '), and even comments.
There are some youtube clips of songs in Lojban, I played them for my family and, unfortunately, response was negative (music was not that nice, and it sounds harsh as you noted).
I think Lojban might have an interesting future as requirements specification and STEM-papers language.
Because it is purposefully unambiguous to interpret.
May be like a modern day Latin, or something...
Lojban is actually equivalent to first-order predicate logic, I believe!
for instance, "lo cmalu noltru (ku)" is equivalent to "there exists some X, such that X satisfies the predicate 'cmalu noltru', i.e. X is a small type-of prince."
unlike Esperanto however, lojban isn't likely to be teachable to children, or fluently speakable. all words in natural human languages seem to have a maximum of three 'arguments', i.e. parts of speech that valsi bind to. words in lojban may have up to five arguments, so it's unclear whether human brains can accommodate that many slots.
additionally, while lojban is LL-parsable, machines like Parsey McParseFace can now accurately parse human universal grammar. unambiguous parsing was a big feature of lojban, so it's lost a major selling point.
but! learning exotic languages is good for the brain, so it's a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor. I speak a conlang with only 2 speakers, and it has enriched my life, so tilt at those windmills! :)
I don't know very much Lojban but (while I agree that the grammar is meant to be a realization of a formal logic), I'm a bit unsure of your specific example with "lo cmalu noltru":
First, I think "lo cmalu noltru" is a sumti (akin to a noun phrase) and not a complete sentence by itself.
Second, I'm not positive about the existential import of "lo". There are many reasons for this, but to take a kind of extreme example, the reform of the meaning of le and lo at https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_gadri#cmavo:_lo_.2... presents the example
lo pavyseljirna cu ranmi danlu gi'e simlu lo ka ge ce'u xirma gi lo pa jirna cu cpana lo mebri be ce'u
'Unicorns are mythical creatures that look like a horse with a horn coming out of their foreheads.'
This doesn't seem to imply that there exists X such that X satisfies the predicate pavyseljirna. Or to take another example, presumably Lojban can express using "lo" the notion that "Counterexamples to Fermat's Last Theorem were never discovered prior to 1993, despite extensive computer searches".
I do think that many Lojban utterances have formal existential import in many cases, and I don't know enough about Lojban to try to describe which ones. :-) (I seem to remember something about a bare gismu implying that the predicate is at some occasion true of something, like "tavli" by itself without arguments meaning something like 'speaking, it's a thing that happens at some point!'. But given the example of talking about unicorns, maybe even this is too strong somehow.)
Edit: ... by the way, what's the conlang with two speakers that you speak?
I don't know any Lojban at all, but I do know formal logic and "there exists" (∃) is usually used to denote existence with respect to some universe of discourse, and not necessarily physical existence. Most mathematical concepts only exist as things that mathematicians talk about, not unlike Unicorns. However, I would read the example sentence as making a statement about all unicorns, of the form "∀ U ∈ Unicorns . U ∈ MythicalCreatures ∧ (∃ H ∈ Horses . looks-like(U, H)) ∧ ∃ H ∈ Horns . (has(U, H) ∧ ∃F ∈ Foreheads . (has(U, F) ∧ coming-out-of(H, F)))" or something to that effect.
The sentence about counterexamples to Fermat's last theorem could be written using an existential quantifier without problem, since it appears in a negated sentence, thus not actually claiming their existence, rather the nonexistence of counterexamples discovered prior to 1993.
However, looking at the definition you linked, it appears that "lo" does not have any specific equivalent in formal logic since "It converts a selbri, selecting its first argument, into a sumti. The resulting expression refers generically to any or some individual or individuals that fit as the first argument of the selbri." which seems to be mostly a grammatical function?
> machines like Parsey McParseFace can now accurately parse human universal grammar. unambiguous parsing was a big feature of lojban, so it's lost a major selling point.
Slow down there ... Most linguists (or a substantial minority) do not subscribe to the theoretical idea of universal grammar. Parsey McParseFace is only an incremental improvement in decades of statistical parsing. The problem of natural language understanding remains largely unsolved. Like other deep learning models, it is not hard to come up with adversarial examples that will confuse the parser but not any competent human language user. The parser is only as good as the data it is trained on; this data is expensive to acquire but there is never enough. Additionally there are a myriad other kinds of ambiguity in language beyond the sentence-level syntactic ambiguity which is resolved by a statistical parser such as Parsey McParseFace.
In my opinion Lojban provides a good illustration of just how hard it is to remove ambiguity from human language.
> Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.
Esperanto is still very easy to learn for Asians, at least more than natural languages. Some of its largest support comes from China, including being taught in grade school, giving university degrees and Radio Peking broadcasts since 1964¹.
On top of that, the premise that Esperanto belongs to the western family is not accurate. "Esperanto is basically an isolating language".²
For those that found this comment intriguing I'd recommend the book "In the land of invented languages". It covers a number of conlangs. Lojban seems quite interesting, I've been meaning to start learning it as well as exploring it as adapting it into a programming language that can be spoken and used to convey general ideas.
Toki pona is fun. I was trying to get my partner to learn it so we could have an obscure way to communicate simple things. Depending on the company switching to spanish (although our proficiency is pretty low) is sometimes effective.
I'd love to keep abreast of interesting conlangs, are there any communities you'd recommend?
Hm while "In the land of invented languages" was a fun read, I found the book to be overly Western natlang focused (I know many more natlangs than I do conlangs, but a lot of my natlangs come from different language families, so I am aware of the large conceptual gap between languages).
As far as keeping abreast conlangs, there's reddit's r/conlangs that's a lot of fun. Lojban and Toki Pona are very popular there.
The fact that Esperanto is more difficult to learn for non-europeans can also be seen as a feature. It enables the use of Esperanto as an introductory European language. There is pretty good evidence that spending a year learning Esperanto before learning, say, English, leads to better English skills than spending an extra year on English.
I wouldn't call that evidence "pretty good." What you'd want to see is a comparison of X years of Esperanto then Y years of English versus X years of <another language> then Y years of English (or perhaps X+Y years of English), with both comparison groups controlled for lingual capabilities of the main conversation cohort (friends and family) as well as incentive to learn languages (English can notoriously be the lazy option).
If you want to claim that Esperanto is easier to learn than, say, English, I would not dispute that. Although I would point out that some of that ease comes from its artificiality--learning about culture is a major component of foreign language courses (particularly in scholastic environments), and Esperanto basically lacks culture.
It appears that a certain jcranmer was also in that thread. Hi!
To summarize: low sample size, confounding factors and mixed results mean that there's no strong evidence to suggest learning Esperanto helps more with learning another foreign language than directly starting to learn that language.
It's difficult to incorporate because it would basically be original research that's a metareview of published articles. Of course, the article itself is basically a metareview of primary source articles, which itself is a no-no on Wikipedia, but at least the fact that it is such basically screams that it's biased and non-NPOV.
Thanks for the note on Toki Pona, my son is learning other languages, and I dabbled in quite a few over the years, and this looks like fun to just play around with. :)
Would you mind giving some links to those Toki Pona Telegram groups? I've wanted to learn for a while, and talking with people seems like a good way to do that.
I have always found Toki Pona incredibly creepy. It's like someone read about Newspeak in 1984 and decided "yes, that sounds great, let's do exactly this" unironically.
They've disproved the strong Sapir-Whorf. At least according to Wikipedia there's some evidence for the the so-called weak version.
In any event, languages at the extreme ends of the spectrum, like Toki Pona and Ithkuil, seem to show rather clearly how language can shape thought. Here's a fascinating point from an The Atlantic article, linked from the Toki Pona website:
One student of the language [Ithkuil] claimed that it
allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names,
in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed
gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be
discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange
new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could
wander forever through an endless landscape of unique
thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive.
-- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/
Perhaps a better, more obvious example is simply the languages of mathematics. There are many concepts that simply cannot be expressed with any substantial accuracy in vernacular language. No amount of metaphor suffices to convey quantum mechanical concepts in a useful, utilitarian way. Heck, didn't Richard Feynman literally invent a new language, Feynman Diagrams, to teach quantum mechanics? (I understand that mathematical languages are perhaps better described as notation, but notation doesn't convey the fact that the concepts often can't be translated into the vernacular.)
I'd argue that a corollary of Sapir-Whorf is that no language can express every possible concept. That, I think, is a far more agreeable claim.
I never learned much from Duolingo. It makes learning languages incredibly boring, and my eyes would glaze over every one of the dozens of times I had to match/construct some variance of "der junge trinkt die milsch." I learned more German just reading English translations of Rammstein lyrics. Anything by Pimsleur is still not very interesting, but at least it can hold my attention.
Anki is pretty awesome. I spent about 1000h learning Japanese with Anki so far. Together with Yomichan it's pretty much the ultimate learning tool, imho.
I learned more French from a day of trying to read Le Petit Prince in French, with the English translation beside, than I did from 3 months of Duolingo.
Rote learning just doesn't work that well for most people.
I find Memrise much more interesting and "powerful". It only shows you sentences and relies on your brain to know how the grammar works (a bit like how a child learns how to speak).
Another interesting artificial language is interlingua. Interlingua is very easy to learn for many people in Europe since interlingua words are taken from English, French, Italian and Spanish. Interlingua is a pragmatic solution for a common language across Europe. As a native spanish speaker I was able to understand about a thousand words in one or two hours studying it. Esperanto is like Haskell, interlingua is like C, one is pure with universal rules for derivation, the other is for using the language from the first day for communication.
Interlingua is the most intriguing conlang for me. It just seems incredibly practical. I'm a native English speaker with only high school french, yet I can pretty much read interlingua despite never having learned it. I imagine native romance language speakers are fluent readers right off the bat. That's huge.
Folksprak is another one like Interlingua, except based on the Germanic languages. One of the nice things about being an English speaker is you can pick up both pretty easily.
Another interesting one is Uròpi which tries to go back to the Indo-European roots of all European languages. It's not as immediately readable as Interlingua or Esperanto but not too bad either: http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html
I used a bunch of Esperanto text sources to make a NLP program (figured it would be easier for a newbie to do since the language is so regular). The code corrected some grammatical errors in the Esperanto Wiki; I did a write-up earlier this month: https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-part-3-correcting-...
[2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?")
This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face:
"It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English."
To be fair to Esperanto, when it was invented English wasn't nearly the lingua franca it is today, and the Internet didn't exist.
I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a language's existence.
When Esperanto was invented, the major powers of Europe were pretty much England, France, and Germany, and French was already the primary language of diplomacy and high culture. At the time, polyglottalism was a feature of, e.g., scientific literature (French and German die out only in the mid-to-late 20th century), but practically speaking, learning just English, French, and German would give you a fairly "universal" coverage, and possibly even just French. So credible lingua francas already existed back then.
Esperanto arose at a particular time and place where linguistic and ethnic divisions fractured communities and even families. We all know that English, German, and French were long used--and are still used--to project power. But where Zamenhof lived this aspect of language played out in a much more complex, violent, and personal manner. While the late 19th century was an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity for Western Europe, it was exceptionally violent for the lower-classes in much of Central and Eastern Europe.
The point of Esperanto wasn't just to be a shared language. Much more importantly to Zamenhof and early Esperantists, the point was a language that wasn't bound to provincial, ethnic, or religious identity. This backfired in the early 20th century as Esperanto became associated with, e.g., Jewish and Anarchist groups. But it seems like in the latter 20th century Esperanto reverted to an internationalist language without association to any distinct political movement. And in that sense it's once again a reprieve from and perhaps an antidote to provincial power dynamics, notwithstanding its European language bias.
Esperanto has nothing to be ashamed of as regards its history or current use, but if it's being touted as a modern auxlang which should be used more often, there are a number of problems its promoters have to come to grips with.
I don't think it's any worse than other auxiliary languages (which I think are all doomed to failure if that's really their goal as opposed to just building a community). I don't know if you can really attack the languages for "problems" if it starts being adopted to the point that it evolves like a natural language (as Esperanto has done). Anything "inefficient" or the like about the language will be changed to the point that native speakers find it suitable.
It's not perfect, but practically it's still the best option. Of all the candidates for an easy to learn international language, it has by at least an order of magnitude the most speakers and materials. For example, the Esperanto wikipedia is larger than the Arabic one.
I also haven't seen any of the other conlangs demonstrate they can be both as expressive and easy to master.
My biggest problem with the idea of a universal language is that it might lead us to understand each other better. This would cause no end of strife and suffering. Suppose it caught on. Imagine the trolling that would happen once anybody could troll anybody else, anywhere in the world!
The Esperanto Facebook group does invite some "interesting" political posts; viewpoints you never see in national language forums (for better or worse...).
Surprisingly this is actually the reason Esperanto is somewhat popular in China. My understanding is that it is often used as a "stepping-stone" language before teaching European national languages. (I have no source for this, beside anecdotes, and having met someone who taught such a course - among other languages - at a Chinese university.)
(I don't know why you're downvoted, you bring up a valid point.)
Pretty much spot on critique. I agree that Esperanto has a fairly thriving community but it doesn't cut as a proper auxiliary language.
I think the concept of Esperanto should be redone under current linguistics knowledge and technology. We will probably end with another half-backed attempt but maybe it would advance Humanity a little more towards having a shared neutral language.
Wow, I didn't think about its origins that way at all, but it makes sense given the timing/context of how it began.
For the unenlightened (like me), Google Translate renders this as:
"In a dense African jungle savage negroes without Di 'have already solved the linguistic problem, by so-called'" [1]
Yeah, not sure if I'd say "ominous", but it's definitely a double-take.
It reminds me a bit of the Indian scene from Disney's Peter Pan (1953) [2]. When it was made, I guess it was supposed to evoke a sense of wonder about the fantasy/dreamlike-nature of their adventure. But in the modern day, it just comes off as "wow, that's incredibly offensive."
What's funny is the cultural/time context. I saw the Peter Pan film as a child (in the 1980s) and I do not remember thinking it was patently offensive. In fact, iirc in US in the 80's it was not considered politically incorrect to use phrases like "Indian giver" or play games like "Cowboys and Indians" with your friends, etc. I think Esperanto's early history might also suffer from this sort of cultural baggage.
I have young kids and watched Peter Pan recently. My kids actually thought nothing of it, even when I cringed. I think the offensiveness of it would never have been obvious to you as a kid.
Maybe my parents were cringing when we watched it decades ago, I don't remember. I'm curious how old your kids are, and what region of the US you're in? My SF Bay Area-schooled kids called out the blatant racism at age 7/8; call it environmental factors if you will.
"per tam-tam' disiĝas la kri'" should be translated "the cry [shout] is broadcast by tom-tom".
One thing I've noticed about the Esperanto community is that, owing to its small size, it is very easy to make one's voice heard. So you get a lot of, "rough edges" shall we say, in the published material. (Ex: I came across about a year ago at an Esperanto book sale a book of jokes or "ŝercoj". Unfortunately almost without exception the jokes were crude and sexist. I don't know why it was even up for sale, alongside works of much higher quality.)
Thanks. And now it's even worse; the phrase they were going for (and Google didn't pick up) must have been something like "godless savages". Just lovely.
* ambiguity
* tons of exceptions
* in my opinion, it's too simple for its own good, which results in overloaded words. Because individual words, especially the short ones, carry little meaning, you bang two or three of them together and get a completely different meaning.
And additionally, the phonetics itself is more complex than needed. Spanish has only 5 vowel sounds, corresponding to the 5 vowels of the Latin alphabet, as does Japanese. English has 20. This is quite a big deal for learning when your native language has a smaller phonetic inventory. My English level is officially C2 (the highest level in the EU framework) and still, I have to think for a second or two before using the words "sheet" and "shit"...
Learning Esperanto is my New Year's resolution. Are there any successful learners who have tips? Right now my plan is to get through duolingo then figure it out from there.
I really, really like Step By Step in Esperanto by Montagu Butler. It's the best introductory textbook of any language that I've read. It's composed of maybe ~1000 or so very short lessons (each is about a paragraph), so it makes it very easy to make a little progress every day even if you only have a couple of minutes before bed. There's a nice mix of reading, translation exercises, pronunciation exercises, and grammar.
Find a local Esperanto group and go to their meetings. We're all pretty welcoming and most will be glad to help you boost your conversational skills.
Also, if you are in the States (or not), check out NASK (Nord-Amerika Somera Kurso). It is a week-long course which takes place across July 4th weekend each year, currently in North Carolina. That is how I built the bulk of my ability. I highly recommend it.
Interestingly, a project I have been tracking, called Monero, has an Esperanto-centric nomenclature for all of their projects, with Monero itself being the name for “coin”
A prominent wallet is called monerujo (ujo makes the word mean container of monero), and the plural form of monero is moneroj. Monero itself of course is mono + -ero, so something like particle of money, like breadcrumbs are to bread or a grain of sand is to the sand as a whole. I'm ashamed that I only recently discovered that was an intentional thing, though the name has caught a sliver of my interest for at least a year now.
Well noted. There is another project that I'm fond of in the Monero ecosystem called 'Kovri', which means "to cover, veil, or wrap". It is a router that is i2p compatible, used to further obfuscate personal information for those who require more anonymity than the traditional transactional security of Monero. There may be others, as well.
I learned about Esperanto from the novel series the Stainless Steal Rat. I was really disappointed with the audio books though, because I always pictured him a young guy, maybe a bit pompous or silly. But certainly not an old gruff grouchy guy. :(
I thought it was just awesome when 10 years later I found out Esperanto was real!
I thought it was neat that Esperanto was used in the books. I first learned of it in about 1980 from a book belonging to a friend's father, who was in the military. It was called 'Esperanto: The Aggressor Language", because it was used by the US Army in their training games.
Believe it or not, I first heard about Esperanto in a Man From UNCLE book (The Monster Wheel Affair), where the bad guys used Esperanto so no one would know what country they came from.
Esperanto media and social gatherings are a good way to expand your cultural horizons. Esperanto speakers tend to hail from many different countries and cultures (especially non-English-speaking ones) so seeking out Esperanto media and groups is an easy way to filter for multicultural content.
Probably not very many practical reasons over another language. From the little I've been exposed to it (brother took some college classes) Esperanto speaker seem to have their own shared culture and close community.
Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest:
"Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1]
"In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2]
In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native
speakers:
"As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3]
(Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.)
EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".
Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington estimated 1 million to 2 million fluent Esperanto speakers about a decade ago. He is the only person I've heard of who has done actual research (he produced the number-of-speakers figures for some 100 languages for the World Almanac). Some methodology at http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html.
That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.
For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language.
Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis. bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.