Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother.

i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.

"Ino" and "ulo" are practically redundant, which makes it (I think) the easiest way to sneak in a masculating affix.

Only one gender can get the shorter prefix, and there are only so many vowels (many people say that Esperanto already has too many vowels). Real surviving cultures aren't so petty that they'd make all their words longer by two characters for the sake of "fairness".

As for -in* being two extra characters for explicit-feminine, it's just something you trade for regular conjugation with such restricted phonotactics.

Now, you could make the argument to ditch grammatical gender altogether, and I'd probably be on board with that. In most cases it does not shorten or clarify sentences.

(ge- is the neuterizing prefix, but in my extremely limited dabbling, it's mostly seen in plurals: gepatroj for parents, but for a single parent, one generally says patro for father and patrino for mother.)

For example, for software projects, where I can, I use Lojban named classes, functions, test strings (instead of 'lorem ... '), and even comments.

There are some youtube clips of songs in Lojban, I played them for my family and, unfortunately, response was negative (music was not that nice, and it sounds harsh as you noted).

I think Lojban might have an interesting future as requirements specification and STEM-papers language. Because it is purposefully unambiguous to interpret. May be like a modern day Latin, or something...

for instance, "lo cmalu noltru (ku)" is equivalent to "there exists some X, such that X satisfies the predicate 'cmalu noltru', i.e. X is a small type-of prince."

unlike Esperanto however, lojban isn't likely to be teachable to children, or fluently speakable. all words in natural human languages seem to have a maximum of three 'arguments', i.e. parts of speech that valsi bind to. words in lojban may have up to five arguments, so it's unclear whether human brains can accommodate that many slots.

additionally, while lojban is LL-parsable, machines like Parsey McParseFace can now accurately parse human universal grammar. unambiguous parsing was a big feature of lojban, so it's lost a major selling point.

but! learning exotic languages is good for the brain, so it's a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor. I speak a conlang with only 2 speakers, and it has enriched my life, so tilt at those windmills! :)

First, I think "lo cmalu noltru" is a sumti (akin to a noun phrase) and not a complete sentence by itself.

Second, I'm not positive about the existential import of "lo". There are many reasons for this, but to take a kind of extreme example, the reform of the meaning of le and lo at https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_gadri#cmavo:_lo_.2... presents the example

lo pavyseljirna cu ranmi danlu gi'e simlu lo ka ge ce'u xirma gi lo pa jirna cu cpana lo mebri be ce'u

'Unicorns are mythical creatures that look like a horse with a horn coming out of their foreheads.'

This doesn't seem to imply that there exists X such that X satisfies the predicate pavyseljirna. Or to take another example, presumably Lojban can express using "lo" the notion that "Counterexamples to Fermat's Last Theorem were never discovered prior to 1993, despite extensive computer searches".

I do think that many Lojban utterances have formal existential import in many cases, and I don't know enough about Lojban to try to describe which ones. :-) (I seem to remember something about a bare gismu implying that the predicate is at some occasion true of something, like "tavli" by itself without arguments meaning something like 'speaking, it's a thing that happens at some point!'. But given the example of talking about unicorns, maybe even this is too strong somehow.)

Edit: ... by the way, what's the conlang with two speakers that you speak?

The sentence about counterexamples to Fermat's last theorem could be written using an existential quantifier without problem, since it appears in a negated sentence, thus not actually claiming their existence, rather the nonexistence of counterexamples discovered prior to 1993.

However, looking at the definition you linked, it appears that "lo" does not have any specific equivalent in formal logic since "It converts a selbri, selecting its first argument, into a sumti. The resulting expression refers generically to any or some individual or individuals that fit as the first argument of the selbri." which seems to be mostly a grammatical function?

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/How_to_use_xorlo

Slow down there ... Most linguists (or a substantial minority) do not subscribe to the theoretical idea of universal grammar. Parsey McParseFace is only an incremental improvement in decades of statistical parsing. The problem of natural language understanding remains largely unsolved. Like other deep learning models, it is not hard to come up with adversarial examples that will confuse the parser but not any competent human language user. The parser is only as good as the data it is trained on; this data is expensive to acquire but there is never enough. Additionally there are a myriad other kinds of ambiguity in language beyond the sentence-level syntactic ambiguity which is resolved by a statistical parser such as Parsey McParseFace.

In my opinion Lojban provides a good illustration of just how hard it is to remove ambiguity from human language.

Esperanto is still very easy to learn for Asians, at least more than natural languages. Some of its largest support comes from China, including being taught in grade school, giving university degrees and Radio Peking broadcasts since 1964¹.

On top of that, the premise that Esperanto belongs to the western family is not accurate. "Esperanto is basically an isolating language".²

[1] http://esperanto.cri.cn/2521/2017/12/27/172s196652.htm

[2] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...

Toki pona is fun. I was trying to get my partner to learn it so we could have an obscure way to communicate simple things. Depending on the company switching to spanish (although our proficiency is pretty low) is sometimes effective.

I'd love to keep abreast of interesting conlangs, are there any communities you'd recommend?

As far as keeping abreast conlangs, there's reddit's r/conlangs that's a lot of fun. Lojban and Toki Pona are very popular there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

If you want to claim that Esperanto is easier to learn than, say, English, I would not dispute that. Although I would point out that some of that ease comes from its artificiality--learning about culture is a major component of foreign language courses (particularly in scholastic environments), and Esperanto basically lacks culture.

It appears that a certain jcranmer was also in that thread. Hi!

To summarize: low sample size, confounding factors and mixed results mean that there's no strong evidence to suggest learning Esperanto helps more with learning another foreign language than directly starting to learn that language.

http://ifiction.org/games/playz.php?cat=1&game=378&mode=html

Edit: Say, shouldn't there be an Esperanto translation?

Harder than what? At least the grammar, pronunciation, and word-building are very regular. Almost any national language will be harder than Esperanto.

In any event, languages at the extreme ends of the spectrum, like Toki Pona and Ithkuil, seem to show rather clearly how language can shape thought. Here's a fascinating point from an The Atlantic article, linked from the Toki Pona website:

   One student of the language [Ithkuil] claimed that it
   allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names,
   in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed
   gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be
   discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange
   new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could
   wander forever through an endless landscape of unique
   thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive.

   -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/

I'd argue that a corollary of Sapir-Whorf is that no language can express every possible concept. That, I think, is a far more agreeable claim.