I studied Lojban (http://lojban.org) a bit out of curiosity many years back (in High School in a deep CONLANG phase), which is a fork of Loglan. I'll speak from the point of view of Lojban, as I know it better, but the fork doesn't fall far from the root so it should all mostly apply to Loglan as well.
Essentially, Lojban and Esperanto come from different intentions: Esperanto wanted to be a common tongue that speakers of various natural languages could learn relatively easily and use for multicultural communications. Loglan and Lojban were started as experimentation around the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language influences mental structure. The goal of these languages was then to see if people used a language with more formal mathematical rigidity/"logic" to it might more easily "think" as better mathematicians. The jury is still out, of course, on whether any of these languages actually do what they set out to do.
Essentially, the concept of Lojban/Loglan is kind of a "What if people actually spoke a natural language that was very similar to a programming language?" (Loglan actually predates most programming languages, and Lojban incorporated some things from programming languages over time.)
From that respect, the grammar of Lojban is stringently less complex than most natural grammars (and Esperanto). There's an official PEG [Parsing Expression Grammar] specification of Lojban these days and Lojban has worked very hard to keep the language grammar Context-Free (in the Chomsky's Hierarchy/Computational Parsing sense). The language's grammar is much more like a programming language than a natural language.
As for the consonant clusters, even the morphology of the words follows a fairly strict parsing pattern. For the most part when reading Lojban/Loglan you only need to pronounce three letters at a time. (This is part of the play in the name LOGical LANguage of the three letter syllable pattern in the language itself. Lojban uses the language's own symbols in its case.)
Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? Ultimately I think it's a matter of whether or not there is a benefit of Apples over Oranges: it's more a matter of your particular taste and what you want out of a conlang. They are all beautiful languages trying to do interesting things.
> Loglan actually predates most programming languages
Indeed the Scientific American mention of Loglan was 1960 -- after the invention of Cobol, Fortran, and Lisp (and 50's crud like autocoder), but before most everything else.
Probably most hear of it for the first time from its prominent mention in Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", where it is the "language" used to program the strong AI that is a major character.
I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons).
> Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto?
I am no longer so sure that the case is any different for conlangs than for natural languages.
If I ask if there's a benefit of French versus Mandarin, people will chime in with their personal favorites and rationalizations for why one is better than the other, but objectively they are both very fine languages for literature and poetry.
«I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons).»
Not to get into too much of a tangent, but the Weak Sapir-Whorf is still an interesting view of things, where if it is easier to speak about something it is easier to work with it. I think Programming Languages bear this out over and over again (Programming Languages are very much a Sapir-Whorf playground). We have the Church-Turing Theorem and know that any Turing Complete language should be able to write just about any program one can reason about, but the fascinating thing is that different languages do seem suited to different domains and we keep trying to optimize programming languages to reason about particular problems, and all of that is fascinating.
It's something we do in the miniscule in natural languages too, with jargon and domain-specific vocabulary and context. I think domain-specific conlangs is an under-explored space, and maybe modern Programming Languages have some interesting input to provide...
Essentially, Lojban and Esperanto come from different intentions: Esperanto wanted to be a common tongue that speakers of various natural languages could learn relatively easily and use for multicultural communications. Loglan and Lojban were started as experimentation around the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language influences mental structure. The goal of these languages was then to see if people used a language with more formal mathematical rigidity/"logic" to it might more easily "think" as better mathematicians. The jury is still out, of course, on whether any of these languages actually do what they set out to do.
Essentially, the concept of Lojban/Loglan is kind of a "What if people actually spoke a natural language that was very similar to a programming language?" (Loglan actually predates most programming languages, and Lojban incorporated some things from programming languages over time.)
From that respect, the grammar of Lojban is stringently less complex than most natural grammars (and Esperanto). There's an official PEG [Parsing Expression Grammar] specification of Lojban these days and Lojban has worked very hard to keep the language grammar Context-Free (in the Chomsky's Hierarchy/Computational Parsing sense). The language's grammar is much more like a programming language than a natural language.
As for the consonant clusters, even the morphology of the words follows a fairly strict parsing pattern. For the most part when reading Lojban/Loglan you only need to pronounce three letters at a time. (This is part of the play in the name LOGical LANguage of the three letter syllable pattern in the language itself. Lojban uses the language's own symbols in its case.)
Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? Ultimately I think it's a matter of whether or not there is a benefit of Apples over Oranges: it's more a matter of your particular taste and what you want out of a conlang. They are all beautiful languages trying to do interesting things.