Item — HN Reader

Esperanto is so similar to any other romance language it's almost trivial to pick up. I can decode a page of it fairly easily. Klingon had a huge body of enthusiasts.

Lojban has no entry level material that is actually engaging. We need a large number of articles about interesting things, but written at the language level of a four year old. With nothing interesting to read, and no other reason to learn other than "it's interesting" it's having a hard time growing.

It needs entry level interesting material.

2 comments

Yeah, agreed.

In fact, the strongest headwind Esperanto constantly faces is Spanish. There's already a romance language with absolutely systematic spelling, easy pronunciation, simple grammar, and few irregularities. It's already the second most widely spoken language on the planet, it has mountains of interesting and elementary material, and there are lots of interesting people whom you can meet only by speaking it.

It's hard for any rationalized romance language to gain traction against that.

I may have an Idea: could we try to bootsrap lojban by writing something akin to Guy Steele's growing a language? Or is lojban so orthogonal that expressing most of its words and grammar in terms of a smaller kernel is impossible?

Sure, that would be quite recursive. But you wouldn't read lojban if you weren't interested in it anyway, so it's bound to be interesting.