From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: LeChevalier: fluency in Lojban
Date: 31 Aug 92 22:22:09 GMT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc., whose 
fluency in Lojban was discussed earlier here, has given me permission
to re-post the following:

I don't have a quick setup for responding to netnews, so I'm sending this 
just to you.  Please repost if you think it appropriate for sci.lang. 
 
Bruce is correct that no one is fluent in Lojban, and that I am the most 
fluent in the language, but not really 'fluent' in the sense that linguists 
use the term. 
 
The state of the art improves all of the time, of course.  I can state rather 
categorically that there was no real fluency in any previous version of Loglan. 
Indeed, Lojban is the first version to really support the needs of conversation. 
JCB reports having had conversation sessions back in the late 70s, but I've 
talked to participants in those 'conversations', and I think heard some tapes 
once or was told about them.  Basically a lot of dead silence with sounds of 
paper shuffling, because no one other than JCB had enough vocabulary solid 
to even make a sentence without looking up one or more words in a word list. 
There was 'conversation' only that that there was no resort to English.  The 
bulk of the sessions was groping, in Loglan, to find the right words that 
someone could understand. 

That was 15 years ago. 
 
IN 1987 my wife and I reached the same point with the then budding Lojban  
version.  On our honeymoon, without word lists, and each of us knowing around 
300 words (but often not overlapping), we were able to 'converse' for about 
an hour with no wordlists, using repetition, pointing, and paraphrase to 
get across the words we didn;t know.  It seemed very much like the process 
whereby one might learn a language my total immersion.  But we tried it only 
once. 
 
IN 1989, 5 of us sustained conversation, with wordlists, for about 4 hours. 
By that time I knew the vocabulary werll enough that I rarely used the word 
list.  A couple of months later, we ahd several such sustained conversations, 
while driving from Washington to Boston, but with Nora and I both NOT using 
word lists.  Early in 1991, we started having weekly conversation sessions 
in Lojban, typically 1-2 hours, in which relatively little use of wordlists    
occurred by the 4 main participants.  However, we usually had at least one 
less skilled person present, and not using wordlists did not mean that  
people didn't have to stop typically once or twice in each sentence to think of 
the word they wanted, and repeat things once or twice for those who missed 
something.  These conversations lasted until one of the 4 was injured in an 
auto accident last Feb., leaving us with only 3 regulars, which we have found 
makes for too sparse a conversation.  We have just finished a new Lojban 
class, which we hope will add another couple of conversation particpants to 
the weekly group later this fall. 
 
Basically the reason why there is no fluent Lojban speech yet is two fold: 

1) for almost no one is there an opportunity to use the language often 
enough to gain fluency; only here in DC have we gotten people to even try 
to sustain conversation, much less do so regularly.  My wife and I probably 
could run our household in Lojban and quickly become fluent, but I have some 
specific reasons for avoiding this - I don't want our usage, already rather 
dominating in the community learning the language, to become a defacto  
idiom; instead I want several people able to speak the language and write in 
it, thus developing a more natural idiom, even if it takes longer.  There is 
also the emotional and mental drain to be considered - I'm already putting 
most of my time into the language, and I need a break once in a while, at least 
until others have gotten up to the level where I am at. 

2) because there has been relatively little advanced usage, Lojban remains a 
pidgin.  We have about 2000 solid vocabulary words, which is enough to 
converse and communicate, but not to converse fluently.  We have the means to 
make any additional words for concepts that we need, but making up words is 
not a fluent language activity.  I am quite skilled at coming up with  
communicative and productive usages on the fly, but NOT at fluent speeds. 
Hence my working vocabulary is 2000 words, though I probably have used perhaps 
3000-4000 different words in my Lojban speaking career.  These words are 
going to have to be recorded in dictionaries, and in written usages for the 
mass of Lojbanists (most of whom are not local to me) to learn about, and I  
suspect that vocabulary level needs to reach more like 5000-10000, with most 
of the words on spontaneous recall, before fluent conversation will be 
sustainable.  Given the great amount of technical and specialized vocabulary 
that pervades most conversation that I experience (and which is necessary to  
keep a conversation going for hours - you can only say so much about the 
weather today %^), I could not comfortably talk for hours without having such 
a vocabulary on tap.  English speakers vocabularies areestimated as being 
much larger than this, of course, but Lojban gains some considerable 
efficiency from its predicate structure wherein words serve as nouns, verbs, 
and adjectives interchangeably. 

The obvious question is "why is it taking so long?"  The answer is that it 
hasn't been a high enough priority for very many people.  Secondary reasons 
for this include the geographical dispersion of Lojbanists (our best writers 
are Nick Nicholas in Australia, Ivan Derzhanski in Scotland, Colin Fine in 
England, John Cowan in New York, and myself in Washington DC). 
 
But another key point is that there are no fluent speakers because there are 
no fluent speakers to learn from.  THose of us bootstrapping the language 
ARE the examples for everyone else, but who do WE learn from.  In writing we 
can learn from each other, which is why Lojban writing has progressed far  
beyond speech in skill level, but until we have a cluster a people in one  
location who are willing to make the commitment to use Lojban at a much higher 
level than 1 hour a week, we won't achieve fluent speech. 

We are in the process of publishing the first books about Lojban, and when t 
those are available, I suspect that there will be people willing to make that  
commitment.  So this situation may change within the next year or two.  Our 
experience 5 years ago on our honeymoon has convinced me that there is no 
reason that Lojban itself is insuffiecient or incapable of being spoken 
fluently. 

(By the way, to avoid the inevitable comparison to Esperanto, I should note 
that language also did not catch on until there was a book to learn from. 
It grew much faster because its vocabulary is so strongly derivative of the 
European word stock, whereas Loglan/Lojban by intent, must not be so 
derivative.  Even so, I have heard that the watershed moment when Esperanto 
really 'succeeded' did not come until something like 1904, when people at 
their international conference discovered to both pleasure and surprise that 
the language was finally well enough known to such a degree that the meeting 
could be conducted in spontaneous and fairly fluent Esperanto.  That was 17 
years after Zamenhof's book, and I've heard that Esperanto was in formation for 
at least 8 years before the book was published.  While Lojban has recaptured 
all of the benefits of the earlier Loglan developments, we basically started 
the language definition process from scratch in 1987.  I don't think we will 
be waiting 17 years for spontaneous fluent speech.) 
 
lojbab 
---- 
lojbab                                                      lojbab@grebyn.com 
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273 
 
For information about the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, please 
provide a paper-mail address to me via mail or phone.  We also have 
limited introductory information available electronically.  The LLG is 
funded solely by your contributions, which are encouraged for the purpose 
of defraying our costs (for both electronic and paper distribution.) 
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