Lojban illustrates perfectly that logic is not the most important feature of a language (since no one wants to, or perhaps even can, learn it to fluency). Arika Okrent deals with this in her (truly excellent) book In The Land Of Invented Languages.
I have one gripe with that book- though it dispels some stereotypes, it perpetuates the idea that the primary purpose of conlanging is to fix what's wrong with natural languages, and make better ones. For many conlangs and conlangers, that's simply not true. _In the Land of Invented Languages_ is one of the best publicizations of conlanging, but the world still lacks a good overview of conlangs simply as art or experiment.
What the most important feature of language is depends on the purpose that a particular language serves. It might be better to say that logical disambiguity is not the most important feature required for human communication (although that's much longer to say). On that note, Lojban and loglangs in general have been discussed fairly extensively on the CONLANG mailing list recently; a couple of relevant messages are
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1106A...
and
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1105A...
There is some standing disagreement over whether anyone has ever really become fluent in Lojban, or if they just become fluent in a creole-Lojban that merely happens to reproduce a subset of Lojban's surface forms.
I didn't get that feel from the book, but then again, I was pretty familiar with conlanging (is that even the correct word?) when I read it, so that might have biased my judgement.
My impression was that part of her thesis in the book was that there is nothing wrong with natural languages. That what looks wrong is, in fact, part of what makes them work.
That seems a highly tenuous line of reasoning. There could be any number of other reasons for its lack of adoption so far, mostly involving the lack of other people who speak it.
There was once a lack of other people who spoke Esperanto. Yet it flourished.
There was once a lack of other people who spoke Klingon, and yet it flourished.
There was (at around the turn of the 20th century) a lack of people who spoke Hebrew, and yet it too flourished and now there's a whole nation of people who speak it.
Lack of people who speak the language is always a problem for any artificial language... at first. Some manage to overcome this problem. Others don't. The interesting question is why this is the case, and what can be done about it.
It helps to have, respectively: early 20th century internationalist idealists, geeky star trek fans, or a newly imposed nation needing a ready made myth of identity, as a constituency of early adopters.
Esperanto is so similar to any other romance language it's almost trivial to pick up. I can decode a page of it fairly easily. Klingon had a huge body of enthusiasts.
Lojban has no entry level material that is actually engaging. We need a large number of articles about interesting things, but written at the language level of a four year old. With nothing interesting to read, and no other reason to learn other than "it's interesting" it's having a hard time growing.
In fact, the strongest headwind Esperanto constantly faces is Spanish. There's already a romance language with absolutely systematic spelling, easy pronunciation, simple grammar, and few irregularities. It's already the second most widely spoken language on the planet, it has mountains of interesting and elementary material, and there are lots of interesting people whom you can meet only by speaking it.
It's hard for any rationalized romance language to gain traction against that.
I may have an Idea: could we try to bootsrap lojban by writing something akin to Guy Steele's growing a language? Or is lojban so orthogonal that expressing most of its words and grammar in terms of a smaller kernel is impossible?
Sure, that would be quite recursive. But you wouldn't read lojban if you weren't interested in it anyway, so it's bound to be interesting.
Hebrew isn't such a great example. The language was still in use as a liturgical language and for reading religious texts, it just wasn't being used (or at least, was barely being used) as a modern spoken language.
Fair enough. But my point is that it's premature to say that being logical doesn't matter (much), or especially that it's a point against Lojban's adoption, as the comment implied. Surely there are other reasons.
Being logical may matter... but I don't think it's the most important feature, as I said. Creating a perfectly logical language doesn't make it obviously valuable to most people. The underlying premise of Lojban is, more or less, that the problem with natural languages is that they're too illogical. Lojban fixed that problem and, relatively speaking, no one cared.
Lots of people hear of Esperanto and decide to pick it up. Almost no one hears of Lojban and picks up. Lots of people are fluent in Esperanto. Perhaps no one is fluent in Lojban. Granted Esperanto had a huge head-start, but I don't think you can attribute its relative success entirely to that factor.
Lojban is still missing something, despite being perfectly logical. English, on the other hand, is flourishing despite being extremely illogical. English is one of the most successful and least logical languages on Earth. Lojban is one of the least successful and most logical languages on Earth. "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." - Randall Munroe
All I was trying to say is that being logical is not a panacea.
"Loglan is fine for syllogism, circuitry, and mathematical calculations, but lacks flavor. Useless for gossip or to whisper into girl's ear." -- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis
(I gather there's some sort of religious issue wrt the difference between Loglan and Lojban, though)
