#this was meant to be just a short explanation of the history of lojban but as always i got emotional about it at the end

[hzrnvm]

HISTORY OF LOJBAN, VERY ABRIDGED

Once upon a time, in the 1970s, a group of logicians, linguists, and science fiction fanatics gathered and performed an experiment entitled Loglan, which was later reworked and renamed into Lojban. The goal of the experiment was to create a language meeting the following criteria (among others): easy for computers, based on predicate logic, syntactically unambiguous, and interesting.

Suddenly, while mixing these criteria into a big pot, the vial of "interesting" cracked, and all the "interesting" spilled into the pot! That's way more "interesting" than any of them intended. Suddenly, the noses of nerds from across the world started perking up. "What's that we smell?" said the nerds. They floated along the aroma and found Lojban, and they said "Wow! This is so cool!" and immediately began eating it like a school of piranhas. "I propose a reform of the gadri!", said one. "I invented an experimental pseudo-number that is unequal to itself, for subscripting!" said another. "I made a new dialect!" said yet another. They wouldn't stop. They debated Lojbanic theory. They wrote essays, they argued, they translated.

The Lojban community grew and grew. But eventually things began to slow. After the rapid growth of from the late 90s throughout the early 2000s, things began to slow in the late 2010s. The "Lojban Timeline" page on the Lojban wiki hasn't been edited since June 2020. The front page hasn't since February 2020.

Now what's left, beyond sporadic remaining nerds on Discord and IRC, is the archives. Decades of nerdiness and theory documented in the IRC records, the wiki essays, the Google Groups posts from days of yore. The year is 2023. Lojban was an experiment that got bigger than was expected. And I am committed to acting autistic about Lojban.

#hzrn #lojban #this was meant to be just a short explanation of the history of lojban but as always i got emotional about it at the end #i plan to write an actual full post about lojban soon btw. #it was originally gonna be about the history but now im thinking it might be better to focus in on something i have more to say about #and is also more interesting #and i know what i would talk about too #i really love talking about lojban dog do you know how strong the autism has to get for me to infodump unprompted? #im really shy about that. i never do that. I really fuckin love talking about lojban