Decided to write about what I like about lojban, for the sake of balance :D
1. 'Focusing' on a particular argument of a verb (and in L, everything is a verb); English does that as well to an extent, via the passive voice; but L has it on steroids. This is also used to turn verbs into nouns.
2. 'Partially applied' verbs; e.g. 'X gives Y to Z' you can pre-fill any of the X, Y and Z. That with the previous point makes a powerful mechanism to express complex relations tersely.
3. Dialects. There are several (incompatible) varieties of lojban; some seem more adopted than others. This is probably not so bad and sort of expected in a conlang but, I wish there were disclaimers like "we're using version X.Y.Z in this text"; I mean, lojban has words for paragraph breaks ffs, yet no words for such metadata?
3.1. BTW yes, the verbalized paragraph breaks are just silly π
2. Lack of consistency in the gismu places. I've been classifying the gismu places by semantics and they are basically all over the place. One example is in the screenshot. Just, why!? This might seem contrived or fixable but, there are more examples like this. For instance, they couldn't decide on the order SOURCE - DESTINATION vs DESTINATION - SOURCE. This makes it harder to learn the words and is just, well, pas comme il faut for a 'logical' language
my gripes with lojban are, currently, the following:
1. Lack of noise robustness. This includes both the literal noise when speaking and the digital noise, for example typos. My favourite example: `so'i` means `many` while `so'u` means `few`. They are literally next to each other on the keyboard yet are the exact opposites. This is the result of a very tight morphology coupled with a certain knack for loading the alphabetic order with semantic meaning
π
I need to stop obsessing with lojban so much. I don't even like the actual language that much lol. Def no intention to actually speak it freely. But I keep browsing la sutysisku and scanning CLL for no reason hehe
extenebris