You read it right. Infodump time. Whatever hyper-specific thing you’ve been itching to really rant about. Rant about it.
LOJBAN
I’m learning lojban with my girlfriend right now for many reasons, I think this language would be absolutely insanely wonderful for autistics, for a few reasons
- It’s syntactically unambiguous, this means every sentence only has one meaning
- Attitudinals, at the start of your sentence, you actually state the tone it is meant to be interpreted in (you can see how that could be massive for autistic people alone)
- Text has the exact same meaning as the spoken language: Y’know how in english, you have to write punctuation marks? in lojban, those are words, meaning when combined with attitudinals, the written language has feature parity with the spoken language.
That sounds really useful! Could you give me some pointers to where I should begin to learn?
I recommend using anki for flash cards, and there’s a few good places like this: https://lojban.io/
I looked into constructed languages for a while, but at this point I’ve accepted that they’re just never going to happen. Language arises naturally, attempts at controlling it inevitably fail. No amount of “but that’s not what that word means, though” will change that actually, it means whatever consensus people land on at any given time.
Besides that, lojban comes across more like a linguist’s attempt at creating “lossless” written communication, whether or not anyone could actually keep it in their head. I’m not sure it was ever meant to be practical.
It won’t ever be practical or adopted by anyone but weirdos, but it’s great as a secret language between people, that’s what me and my girlfriend are using it for.
