This Friday past, I started learning Lojban. For the non-initiate, Lojban is a constructed language based on predicate logic that is syntactically unambiguous. I’d known about it for years, probably hearing about it first on CBC, maybe 10 years ago. It’s the sort of thing that shows up in Dinosaur Comics or in XKCD periodically. Up until this weekend, the existence of Lojban had mostly been one of those “cocktail party facts,” but then I finally took the plunge. After 1 weekend of working on it, I’m about 35% of the way through Lojban for Beginners, having downloaded it to my Kobo for reference during the car ride to Stratford.

It’s often billed as being an ideal language for fields like law, science or philosophy, due to its unambiguous and culturally neutral nature. So I set out to find out certain specialised terms from my field, bioethics, and it turns out that they mostly don’t exist yet. This, of course, offers some exciting opportunities for a grad student. :)

I’ve convinced a few people in Montréal to learn Lojban with me, and even found a Montrealer who speaks Lojban on a #lojban IRC channel. (Yes, IRC still exists!) We may “ckafi pinxe kansa,” as they say in Lojban, apparently.

If you too want to get in on the ground floor of Lojban Montréal, let me know!