Lojban Totally Explained

Everything about Lojban totally explained

The language was built to attempt to remove some limits on human thought; these limits are not understood, so that the tendency is to try to remove restrictions whenever we find the language structure gets in our way. You definitely can talk nonsense in Lojban.

Bob LeChevalier:
In Lojban, a little grammar makes for a lot of semantic fun, since the grammar doesn't interfere with the semantic quibble you love. [...] In addition to its grammar, Lojban is definitely a priori in its words[...] We presume that everything can be covered as compounds of the classification scheme implied by the gismu. [...] We haven't, though, tried to impose a system on the universe like most a priori languages have. Instead, we've tried to broaden gismu flexibility so that multiple approaches to classifying the universe are possible. Our rule is that any word have one meaning, not that any meaning have one word. There is no 'proper' classification scheme in Lojban. [...] Lojban offers a new world of thought.

Why Lojban?

discussed by Arthur Protin, Bob LeChevalier, Carl Burke, Doug Landauer, Guy Steele, Jack Waugh, Jeff Prothero, Jim Carter, and Robert Chassell, as well as ZAhO tenses

, the concepts which "average English speakers won't recognize" because most of them (the concepts) "have no exact English counterpart".
Like most languages with few speakers, Lojban lacks much of an associated body of literature and its creative extensions have not been fully realized (the true potential of its attitudinal system, for example, is considered unlikely to be drawn out "until and unless we've children raised entirely in a multi-cultural Lojban-speaking environment"). Also such collective or encyclopedic sources of knowledge like the Lojban wikipedia, which may help expand the language's lexical horizon, are in need of growth.
Presently accessible Lojbanic writings are principally concentrated on the Lojban.org, though there exist independent Lojbanic blog/journal sites as well. The Lojban IRC (or its archive) has a gathering of Lojbanic expressions too, but its grammatical correctness isn't always guaranteed. These available materials on the internet include both original works and translations of classic pieces in the field of natural languages, ranging from poetry, short story, novel, and academic writing. This has been paralleled with a chrestomathy project aiming to produce a collection of translated writings in order to show wide samplings of various language, hopefully longer than 10000 words and with a variety of genres and styles (see also - External link: Literature). Exemplary works that are already available include:

Alice in Wonderland by the English-Irish author Lewis Carroll

One Thousand Nights and a Night (a classic Arabic tale)

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Chapter 1) by the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein

The Prophet by the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran

The Little Things by the short story writer/poet Raymond Carver

The Man and the Snake by the short story writer/satirist Ambrose Bierce

The Book by the cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft

The Legend of Zelda (a classic NES fantasy game) by Nintendo Other translation projects include:

Eaton Interface: a translation of the Helen Eaton concept list into Lojban.

Parliamentary Rules: Lojban terms for parliamentary actions.

Lojban Adventure: a Lojban version of the classic Colossal Cave text adventure game. Compound words (lujvo) and borrowed words (fu'ivla) are continually increasing as the speakers find demands. The number of root words (gismu) and structure words (cmavo) are basically unchanging, but new inventions are to be accepted as experimental components. In fact, it has been noticed that particular inclination or disproportion exists in the available vocabulary. Cortesi has pointed out the lack of certain terms for mathematics and geometry (although this demand may now be disputed as the current set of Lojban vocabulary does actually allow speakers to express such notions as steradian (stero), trigonometric tangent (tanjo), multiplicative inverse (fa'i), matrix transpose (re'a) among a number of other kinds of operators or metric units). Other instances which require speakers to construct noncanonical words:

There are few (almost non-existent) entries of African country names on the official list of root words while other country names (especially those with large populations of speakers of the six source languages) are covered to a remarkable extent.

Such distinction as between palne (tray) and palta (plate) or such peculiar terms as nilda'ibandu ("armor class", used in role playing games) exist while no distinction between "illustration" and "photography" is made by the available set of gismu (that is, no exclusive root word for "photography" exists except the generic pixra (picture)) (see also - Grammar: Morphology: brivla: gismu).

Learning aids development

Apart from the actual practice of the language, some members of the community and LLG have been endeavoring to create various aids for the learners. The Complete Lojban Language, the definitive word on all aspects of Lojban, is one of them, finalized in 1997. Some of the projects in varying stages of completeness are:

Phrasebook: Lojbanic Phrasebook Project, CVS/Wiki Lojban Phrasebook, Pocket Dictionary

Parser: Lojban Parser/Machine Grammar (by Robin Lee Powell), jbofi'e (by Richard Curnow), valfendi (by Pierre Abbat)

Database: jbovlaste (by Robin Lee Powell), Reference Database (by Matt Arnold on DabbleDB)

Others: Lojban/Logic book and webpage (by John Clifford), TLI Loglan Interface (by Steven Belknap and Bob LeChevalier) ť (see also - External link: Learning Courses/Resources)

A dedicated Lojban popup dictionary as a Firefox add-on has been suggested, but is still in the level of speculation as the present lexing and parsing system of Lojban doesn't cover JavaScript.

Community development

Currently, Lojban's learning resources available on the internet cover mainly those speakers of English, French, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Esperanto, to varying degrees.
Disproportion in the community population is still noticeable. It is reasonably hoped among Lojbanists that more people from different cultural/linguistic backgrounds join the community in order to maintain and further complement the intended neutrality of the language. (see also - Community)

Future goals

While the initial aim of the Loglan project was to investigate the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the active Lojban community recognizes additional goals for the language to be attained in the future, including but not limited to:

Eliminating ambiguity in language

Use as a potential International Auxiliary Language

Use as a potential academic language, such as in science or philosophy

Use as an educational tool

Research in linguistics

Research in artificial intelligence and machine understanding

Improved human-computer communication, storage ontologies, and computer translation of natural language text

Improved human-human communication, due to the logical and unambiguous structure and greater means of expression

Enjoyment as a hobby

Grammar

Phonology

Lojban has 6 vowels and 21 consonants. Some of them have, apart from the preferred/standard sounds, permitted variants intended to cover dissimilitude in pronunciation by speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.
   There are also 16 diphthongs (and no triphthongs). Distinction between diphthongs and monophthongs can be made by inserting a comma in the Latin alphabet mode.
   The sounds may be allophoned.
   For those who, given their native language background, may have trouble pronouncing (certain) consonant clusters, there's the option of inserting buffer vowels between them, as long as they differ sufficiently from the phonological vowels and are pronounced as short as possible. The resulting added syllables are completely ignored by the grammar, including for the purposes of stress determination.

Orthography

Lojban may be written in different orthography systems as long as it meets the required regularities and unambiguities. Some of the reasons for such elasticity would be as follows:

Lojban is rather defined by the phonemes (spoken form of words), therefore, as long as they're correctly rendered so as to maintain the Lojbanic audio-visual isomorphism, a representational system can be said to be an appropriate orthography of the language;

Lojban is meant to be as culturally neutral as possible, so it's never crucial or fundamental to claim that some particular orthography of some particular languages (for example the Latin alphabet) should be the dominant mode. Some Lojbanists extend this principle so as to claim that even an original orthography of the language is to be sought.
This article will use the common Latin alphabet mode.

Morphology

Lojban has 3 word-classes: predicate words, structure words, and name words. Each of them has uniquely identifying properties, so that one can unambiguously recognize which word is of which part of speech in a string of the language. They may be further divided in sub-classes. There also exists a special fragmental form assigned to some of the words, from which longer words can be compounded.

Syntax and semantics

According to What Is Lojban?, the language's grammatical structures are "defined by a set of rules that have been tested to be unambiguous using computers", which is in effect called the "machine grammar". Hence the characteristics of the standard syntactic (not semantic) constructs in Lojban:

each word has exactly one grammatical interpretation;

the words relate grammatically to each other in exactly one way. Such standards, however, are to be attained with certain carefulness:

It is important to note that new Lojbanists won't be able to speak 'perfectly' when first learning Lojban. In fact, you may never speak perfectly in 'natural' Lojban conversation, even though you achieve fluency in the language. No English speaker always speaks textbook English in natural conversation; Lojban speakers will also make grammatical errors when talking quickly. Lojbanists will, however, be able to speak or write unambiguously if they're careful, which is difficult if not impossible with a natural language.

Nick Nicholas and John Cowan. 'What Is Lojban? II.3

The computer-tested, unambiguous rules also include grammar for 'incomplete' sentences for example for narrative, quotational, or mathematical phrases.
Lojbanic expressions are modular; smaller constructs of words are assembled into larger phrases so that all incorporating pieces manifest as a possible grammatical unity. This mechanism allows for simple yet infinitely powerful phrasings; "a more complex phrase can be placed inside a simple structure, which in turn can be used in another instance of the complex phrase structure".
Its typology can be said to be basically Subject Verb Object and Subject Object Verb. However, it can practically be anything:

mi prami do (SVO)

mi do prami (SOV)

do se prami mi (OVS)

do mi se prami (OSV)

prami fa mi do (VSO)

prami do fa mi (VOS) Such flexibility has to do with the language's intended capability to translate as many expressions of natural languages as possible, based on a unique positional case system. The meaning of the sentence changes, the meaning of the sentence changes too. As shown above, Lojban has particular devices to preserve such semantic structure of words while altering their order.
   As befits a logical language, there's a large assortment of logical connectives. Such conjunction words take different forms depending on what they connect, another reason why the (standard) Lojbanic expressions are typically precise and clear.
   Multiple predicate words may be linked up together so as to narrow the semantic scope of the phrase. In skami pilno "computer user(s)", the modifying word skami narrows the sense of the modified word pilno to form a more specific concept (in which case the modifier may resemble English adverbs or adjectives).
   One could go still farther, adding a quite extreme example of its syntactical flexibility.
   Lojban can "imitate" easily even Amerindian one-word sentences like this one:

Nootka: inikwihl'minik'isit

English: (about) Several small fires were burning in the house.

Lojban: so'i cmalu fagri puca'o jelca ne'i le zdani

Gloss: many small fire past-continuing burn inside the house (Translation after English)

Lojban: zdane'ikemcmafagyso'ikemprununjelca (so-called lujvo or compound word mainly using the underlying rafsi or roots according to strict compositional rules)

Gloss: (about) house-inside type-of small fire multitude type-of past event type of burning The Nootka one-word sentence breaks down a bit differently as:
inkiw (fire/burn) -ihl (in-the-house) -'minik (plural) -'is (diminutive) -'it (past-tense) which can be readily expressed in Lojban the same way:

Lojban: fagykemyzdanerso'icmapru

Gloss: fire-type-house-inside-many-small-past-event

Samples

Common expressions

Lojban	literal meaning	English
coi/co'o	[greetings!]/[farewell!]	hello/good-bye
pe'u	[please!]	please
ki'e	[thankful!]	thank you
.u'u	[pity!]	I'm sorry
xu do se glibau/jbobau	[true-false?] you is-a-speaker-of-English/Lojban-language	Do you speak English/Lojban?
ti/ta	that-here/that-there	this one/that one
mi na jimpe	I [false] understand	I don't understand
go'i	the-last-bridi	yes/that's true
na go'i	[false] the-last-bridi	no/that's false
la'u ma	being-a-quantity-of what	how much/many?
ma jdima	what is-the-price-of	what's the cost?
ma stuzi lo vimku'a	what is-an-inherent-site-of that-which-is toilet	Where's the toilet?

Some unique Lojbanic expressions

pei .o'ucu'i
[?] [relaxation!] [neutral]
Are you no longer in pain?

mi nelci ko
I is-fond-of you-[imperative]
Make me be fond of you!

le cukta be'u cu zvati ma
that-which-is-described-as book [need!] is-at what
Where's the book? I need it!

ko ga'inai nenri klama le mi zdani
you-[imperative] [me-the-social-inferior!] inside-type-of come that-which-is-described-as having-to-do-with-me house
I would be honored if you'd enter my residence.

le nanmu cu ninmu
one-or-more-specific-things-which-I-describe-as "men" are women
The man/men is/are a woman/women.

seri'agi mi jgari lei djacu gi mi jgari le kabri
With-physical-effect I grasp the-mass-of water, I grasp the cup.
Therefore I grasp the water, I grasp the cup.

Tongue Twisters

lo'u lu le la li'u le'u

le crisa srasu cu rirci crino

tisna fa la tsani le cnita tsina lo tinci tinsa

la bab. zbasu loi bakyzbabu loi bakygrasu

mi na djuno le du'u klama fa makau la makaus. makau makau makau

Others

(a Lojbanic poem)

The Lord's Prayer

doi cevrirni.iu noi zvati le do cevzda do'u fu'e .aicai .e'ecai lo do cmene ru'i censa .i le do nobli turni be la ter. ku se cfari .i loi do se djica ba snada mulno vi'e le cevzda .e .a'o la ter. .i fu'e .e'o ko dunda ca le cabdei le ri nanba mi'a .i ko fraxu mi loi ri zu'o palci .ijo mi fraxu roda poi pacyzu'e xrani mi .i ko gidva mi fa'anai loi pacyxlu .i ko sepri'a mi loi palci .i .uicai ni'i loi se turni .e loi vlipa .e loi mi'orselsi'a cu me le do romei fa'o

Community

The Internet

The activities of Lojban speakers are mostly via the Internet:

Lojban.org

: A user-maintained site, attempting to reflect a cross section of the Lojban community outside of the LLG.

Lojban IRC (irc.freenode.net #lojban): Based on the Freenode IRC network. One may use a web interface as an alternative to IRC clients.

Lojban Mailing List

: A beginner-oriented means to talk/learn about the language.

jbovlaste

: An official, dictionary editing interface created by Jay Kominek, updated by Robin Lee Powell. People can post new Lojbanic words with definitions and examples, or vote for such experimental words.

jbobac

: A web-based forum that has posts/threads made up mainly of sound files.

samxarmuj/The Lojban Moo: A multi-user virtual environment, similar to the old text adventure games. A guide is given here

le jbopre pe lj's Journal

: A communal Lojban blog.

lojban-valsi

: A-word-a-day mailing list on the Yahoo! Groups.

: The Lojban Wikipedia, where discussions may be conversed in English.

The Logfest

Gatherings of Lojbanists have been organized in USA annually since as early as 1990, called Logfest. It is mostly informal, taking place on a weekend, with the only scheduled activity being the annual meeting of the LLG. Those who can't be present may still be involved via IRC. Activities may be whatever the attendees want to do: Lojban conversation, lessons, technical discussions, or socializing.

Population

The total number of Lojban speakers is unknown.
According to Lojban.org, places known to have concentration of Lojbanists are:

Australia, Israel, United States Also Frappr.com shows that, as of August 2007, some people from following countries are interested in or enthusiasts of the language:

Argentina, Canada, China, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Venezuela. It is generally noticed that there's little participation from Hindi speaking people, in spite of the etymological nature of Lojban vocabulary.
Below are some of the notable personalities who have contributed to the development of Lojban:

Bob LeChevalier (aka lojbab): the president of the LLG.

John Cowan: the author of The Complete Lojban Language.

Jorge Llambías (aka xorxes): one of the most active Lojbanists, having done several translations. He is also a prominent figure on the mailing list, helping the beginners with the language.

Matt Arnold (aka epkat): one of the most active Lojbanists. He has been contributing to the translation project and software development.

Nick Nicholas (aka nitcion): an Australian linguist. He is the first fluent Lojban speaker (although he insists that he was the second; he's known to be excessively modest). He has done a lot of Lojbanic writing, including Lojban For Beginners coauthored by Robin Turner.

Robin Lee Powell (aka camgusmis): the current webmaster of Lojban.org. He provides the machine and bandwidth from which the site is served. He has also written several Lojbanic materials including a novel-sized story.

Robin Turner: a British philosopher and linguist living in Turkey. He is the coauthor of Lojban For Beginners.

Comparison with other auxiliary languages

Loglan

Loglan is now a generic term that refers both to James Cooke Brown's Loglan, and all languages descended from it. Since the organization that Dr. Brown established, The Loglan Institute (TLI), still calls its language Loglan, it's necessary to state that this section refers specifically to the TLI language, instead of the entire family of languages.
   The principal difference between Lojban and Loglan is one of lexicon. A Washington DC splinter group, which later formed The Logical Language Group, LLG, decided in 1986 to remake the entire vocabulary of Loglan in order to evade Dr. Brown's claim of copyright to the language. After a lengthy battle in court, his claim to copyright was ruled invalid. But by then, the new vocabulary was already cemented as a part of the new language, which was called Lojban: A realization of Loglan by its supporters.
   The closed set of five-letter words was the first part of the vocabulary to be remade. The words for Lojban were made by the same principles as those for Loglan; that is, candidate forms were chosen according to how many sounds they'd in common with their equivalent in some of the most commonly spoken languages on Earth, which was then multiplied by the number of speakers of the languages with which the words had letters in common. The difference with the Lojban remake of the root words was that the weighting was updated to reflect more recent numbers of speakers for the languages. This resulted in word forms that had fewer sounds taken from English, and more sounds taken from Chinese. For instance, the Loglan word norma is equivalent to the Lojban word cnano (cf. Chinese 常, pinyin cháng), both meaning "normal".
   Grammatical words were gradually added to Lojban as the grammatical description of the language was made.
   Loglan and Lojban still have essentially the same grammars, and most of what is said in the Grammar section above holds true for Loglan as well. Most simple, declarative sentences could be translated word by word between the two languages; but the grammars differ in the details, and in their formal foundations. The grammar of Lojban is defined mostly in the language definition formalism YACC, with a few formal "pre-processing" rules. Loglan also has a machine grammar, but it isn't definitive; it's based on a relatively small corpus of sentences that has remained unchanged through the decades, which takes precedence in case of a discrepancy.
   There are also many differences in the terminology used in English to talk about the two languages. In his writings, Brown used many terms based on English, Latin and Greek, some of which were already established with a slightly different meaning. On the other hand, the Lojban camp freely borrowed grammatical terms from Lojban itself. For example, what linguists call roots or root words, Loglanists call primitives or prims, and Lojbanists call gismu. The lexeme of Loglan and selma'o of Lojban have nothing to do with the linguistic meaning of lexeme. It is a kind of part of speech, a subdivision of the set of grammatical words, or particles, which loglanists call little words and lojbanists cmavo. Loglan and Lojban have a grammatical construct called metaphor and tanru, respectively; this isn't really a metaphor, but a kind of modifier-modificand relationship, similar to that of a noun adjunct and noun. A borrowed word in Loglan is simply called a borrowing; but in English discussions of Lojban, the Lojban word fu'ivla is used. This is probably because in Lojban, unlike Loglan, a certain set of CV templates is reserved for borrowed words.
   In the new phonology for Lojban, the consonant q and the vowel w were removed, and the consonant h was replaced by x. The consonant ' (apostrophe) was added with the value of [h] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but its distribution is such that it can appear only intervocally, and in discussions of the morphology and phonotactics, it's described not as a proper consonant, but a "voiceless glide". (This phoneme is realized as [θ] by some speakers.) A rigid phonotactical system was made for Lojban, but Loglan doesn't seem to have had such a system.

Lojsk

Lojsk was conceived by Ari Reyes, heavily influenced by Loglan, Lojban, Universal Networking Language (UNL), Esperanto, Visual Basic, Dutton's Speedwords, Ceqli and Guaspi. It is designed to be more single-syllable oriented. If possible, that would nonetheless lead Lojsk to be even more sensitive to noisy environments than Lojban is, therefore its practicability in oral communication may be questioned.

Voksigid

Voksigid by Bruce R. Gilson attempts to construct a predicate language of a different type from those which had gone before. Its syntax was somewhat influenced by Japanese, and its vocabulary was based mostly on European language roots. Loglan and Lojban both use word order to mark the various places in the predication, but because remembering which position means which role in the predication might be beyond easy memorization for most people, Voksigid was designed in order to overcome this issue.

Guaspi

Guaspi is a descendent of Lojban and Loglan which uses Chinese-like tones to mark grammatical structure, developed by Jim Carter. By using tones instead of structure words, and cutting predicates from two to one syllable, Carter has fixed a minor flaw in Guaspi's predecessors -- they take a lot of syllables to say things.

Pop Culture Reference

XKCD, a popular webcomic, makes reference to this language (External Link

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