what even is Lojban? why not learn a normal language like Spanish?
you see, it’s not my fault. there is a worm that travels the wrinkles of my brain and it decides these things for me,
I don’t know what it is with me, but ever since I found out about Esperanto when I was about 12, there hasn’t been a year where I don’t have a moment learning some weird new conlang.
when I was younger it was all the euroclone auxlangs and their history — Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Novial and so on. I read the founding documents, grammars, and so much more of these failed early twentieth century projects to the point that I even had my own terrible euroclone auxlang that was just a Novial clone except worse. I remember having a whole crisis about how to spell /j/ and /dʒ/, because I didn’t want to litter the spelling with too much y, and ended up deciding on j for the glide and… gj (yes…) for the affricate, somehow, until I decided that was a terrible idea, and then after a year of doing this thing I realized making a euroclone is a terrible idea in general. 13 to 14 year old me was very unserious.
after growing out of that, I think my focus moved away from conlangs and into Japanese for a year or two, which is still a language I speak reasonably well — unlike the other natlangs I studied for a while but eventually gave up on, like French and Russian. I started learning Japanese for the challenge. everyone says it’s so hard, but is it really? I think I can do it, honestly. and it turns out I can, kinda. it’s already been seven years since I got started with Japanese, so if I really had invested into it more than I did or do now I think I would have already been fluent by this point. but alas, the Worm in my brain decides what my next interest is going to be and not the other way around.1
anyway, after that more intense phase with Japanese, I think the Worm wasn’t into a specific conlang for a while, but I did have a heavy mahjong phase for a while as well (not like that has anything to do with languages, except it does because Japanese mahjong terms are all Mandarin loans and the way they’re transcribed intrigued me and [details omitted for brevity]).
then I had a Viossa phase (two Viossa phases actually), another one with Toki Pona (a language that I had actually already had a look at before, because it’s just so simple2), and then after that came Lojban, which managed to catch my attention for the last year or so, and kind of still does. I’m kind of ‘eh’ about the community3, given some quite important people have left or are on hiatus now, so we don’t have a lot of momentum, but these things have their own ups and downs. I can talk about the good and the bad parts of loglang communities some other day.
now though my attention has been turning to another loglang4, Toaq. Toaq, in short, is what Lojban would be if the creators of Lojban knew what they were doing. I postponed learning it for a while because ‘phonemic tone scary’, but the tone system isn’t even hard… it’s literally just pitch accent like Japanese! not every syllable has a tone (it’s just one tone assigned per word), and there’s only three tones (rising, falling, and circumflex), so it’s easier than you’d think. I’ve heard from speakers of the language that the Toaq community isn’t in its best era right now, but neither are us Lojbanists, so I guess we should all just log off and stop speaking fake languages even if the urge of reading decade-old mailing list threads about the semantics of articles is too tempting. or we can just have fun with invented languages sometimes5 idk