Lojban

Lojban is a constructed language. Its grammar is based on the principles of logic. The syntax is unambiguous, but you can still semantically be ambiguous if you want. You can express complex emotions or attitudes too. Learning Lojban is intellectually stimulating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
http://www.lojban.org/

coi = Hi

co'o = Bye

mi'e ... = I'm ...

Or then learn a real language and talk with many different people from other cultures. Very intellectually stimulating.

>>3

I know. I'm multilingual myself.

What makes you think Lojban isn't a real language? People use it for daily conversation on IRC, for instance. Its literature is developing too.

Lojban is culturally neutral, a quality which most other human languages (including Esperanto) lack. For example, the same sentence can translate sentences from an accusative language (English, Japanese, etc.) or an ergative language (Basque, Tibetan, etc.). Also morphology is free of such culture-specific notions as gender and number. One of the language's original purpose was testing the linguistic relativity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity).

Talking with people from different cultures is one thing, yes. And talking with them in a culturally neutral language is another thing. (The Lojban community is actually international.)

Haven't we already tried that with Esperanto? Cause last time I heard of Esperanto it was an incident on an imaginary spaceship in a fiction book.

>>5

Esperanto is based on European languages.
"The vocabulary, for example, is about two-thirds Romance and one-third Germanic; the syntax is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Esperanto
After all, it was created by an oculist in the 19th century, that's before the development of modern linguistics, logic, and computer programming.

Lojban's root words (representing concepts most basic to the language) are constructed from the lexicons of 6 major languages: Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian. A certain computer algorithm synthesized them so that their recognizability for speakers of other languages are maximized. And, unlike Esperanto, the morphology has no default gender bias/impartiality:

"boy"
nanla (Lojban)
knab-o (Esperanto)

"girl"
nixli (Lojban)
knab-in-o (Esperanto)

(Notice also that "nanla" contains the sound of the Chinese "男孩" [nán hái], and "nixli" the sound of "女孩" [nǚ hái].)

You can ask questions on IRC too (there are usually 50-80 people in, which is about twice the number of Esperanto's 20-40):
http://www.lojban.org/irc/

Fuck yes, lojban.

Sounds like a nigger language.