On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:00:35 -0800, Donald J. HARLOW 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>'Mastering Lojban requires a lot of work. It requires making tons of
>exercises, most of which are rather hard.'
>
>...
>
>(Yanis Batura, on the page pointed to by Todd)
>
>Reminiscent of, though different from, a similar explanation for the
>lack of fluent speakers of Lojban's elder twin, Loglan:
>
>' ...because of the low geographic density of the loglaphone
>population, no true speech-communities have formed; so there are
>still no fluent speakers of the language ...'
>
>(Brown, Burson, Handley, Kennaway, and McIvor: "An Unambiguous
>Grammar for Loglan, a Speakable Language", in "La Logli" 1996/1; p.
>72, footnote 2.)
>
>I wonder whether these people have ever taken a look at the "Unua
>Libro" by Dr. Esperanto, which apparently produced a few fluent
>speakers of Esperanto, in isolation. An explanation, a word list, a
>set of grammatical rules, and a couple of pages of short samples of
>the language. No supplementary multimedia materials, no true
>speech-communities ...

Apples v. Oranges (best two falls out of three, four-round limit)

Loglan was not designed as an auxlang--and some of us who got involved 
later said it wasn't suited to such use. It was meant to facilitate certain 
behavior--and rather unnatural behavior at that: predicate logic. One of 
the areas where JCB and I always disagreed was that I contend that no 
natural language uses logical predicates. (Linguistic ones are different.) 
I told various people that I expected Loglan to fail in one sense, but to 
fail usefully: I hoped it would provide some helpful data. I also hoped the 
case tags would morph into something else, and the predicate-orientation 
would become something more natural. Lojban doesn't have case tags (or 
didn't at last look), so I doubt it has the equipment to make the jump Eo 
did well over a cetury back from project to language.

Steve