They steal the eggs of large birds and wish them into people.

December 25, 2019 4:34 PM

YouTuber Ewa U describes an imaginary world with unreliable magic in five episodes. Her voice-overs for the series are entirely in Lojban with English subtitles. Videos below the fold.

The Lay of the Land

The Food Web

The Rainforest Buffet

The Human Inhabitants

The Magic Unsystem

Bonus episode in English about the same world:

A Tunic Adventure

Ewa talks about herself:

Q&A | Me, Videos, and Worldbuilding (Aug. 2018)

Q&A | Draw with Me (Nov. 2019)

This is one of the stranger things I’ve come across on YouTube. I thought some of you might appreciate it. Other than this series, the rest of her videos are in English, but very much in the same vein.

posted by nangar (7 comments total)

This is relevant to my interests.

Her Lojban pronunciation is incredibly different than my own, but after a couple of minutes something clicked and I could understand as much of it as I am likely able to given my long absence from the language. She is so much more fluent than I ever was and it's delightful. This makes me want to spend some time reacquainting myself with the language.

Furthermore, the world building is definitely my kind of weird. A++, top notch niche content.
posted by thedward at 6:06 PM on December 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I was really into Lojban for a little bit in high school. I never really learned much, though. I remember .i le botpi cu blanu and .oi.uinai and that's about it. Glad there's still an active community around it!
posted by biogeo at 7:02 PM on December 25, 2019

Her Lojban pronunciation is incredibly different than my own

I wonder if that tends to be a thing a lot more in general with conlangs; the difficulty of finding natural local communities of practice (since it needs to be a driving interest in the language that brings speakers together, rather than proximity being a natural huge factor of shared speech in natural language) seems like it'd naturally lead to a lot more self-study and hence idiolect from speaker to speaker. The bookreader's problem—knowing the word but not knowing how others expect it to be pronounced—but for an entire language, and for every speaker.
posted by cortex at 7:56 AM on December 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Most definitely. Also conlangs vary in how precisely their phonology is specified, and some, like Lojban, precisely specify a very inclusive standard for phonological ‘correct’ pronunciation. Even if the phonology is well specified and speakers are able to accurately reproduce the correct sounds, there is still the issue of prosody which is usually, in my experience, somewhat underspecified in conlangs.
posted by thedward at 10:16 AM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

As I understand it, one goal behind Lojban's creation was to make it difficult to say illogical things. The irony of Lojban-language fiction about unreliable magic is so delicious that I can hardly wait to consume this series.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:33 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

The hyper-logic is even better than I had hoped. "I accidentally made my world a rainforest, so I had better invent lots of plants. The first 150 I will create using the following system. And I'm done! But now I need ..."
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:52 AM on December 26, 2019

A subset of Lojban can be mapped directly to predicate logic; for this to be true it must allow for illogical, unprovable, and untrue statements as you cannot use the the rules of predicate logic to reason about statements that can't be expressed.

It's more accurate to say that Lojban is intended to make it easy to say logical things—but not even necessarily easier.

Alice in Wonderland was one of the earlier works of literature to be translated into Lojban.
posted by thedward at 12:36 PM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]