Lojban

Lojban
la .lojban.
Pronunciation	[laʔˈloʒbanʔ]
Created by	Logical Language Group
Date	1987
Setting	a logically engineered language for various usages
Language codes
ISO 639-2	jbo
ISO 639-3	jbo
Glottolog	none

Lojban (pronounced ˈloʒban) is a conlang, syntactically unambiguous human language created by the Logical Language Group. It succeeds the Loglan project.

The Logical Language Group (LLG) began developing Lojban in 1987. The LLG sought to realize Loglan's purposes, and further improve the language by making it more usable and freely available (as indicated by its official full English title, "Lojban: A Realization of Loglan"). After a long initial period of debating and testing, the baseline was completed in 1997, and published as The Complete Lojban Language. In an interview in 2010 with w:The New York Times, w:Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, stated: "The constructed language with the most complete grammar is probably Lojban—a language created to reflect the principles of logic."

Introduction

Lojban is proposed as a speakable language for communication between people of different language backgrounds, as a potential means of machine translation, and as a tool to explore the intersection between human language and software.

Origin

The name "Lojban" is a compound formed from loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language).

History

Lojban's predecessor, Loglan, a language invented by w:James Cooke Brown in 1955 and later developed by The Loglan Institute, was originally conceived as a means to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought (an assumption known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis).

As Brown started to claim his copyright on the language's components, bans were put on the community's activity to stop them changing aspects of the language. In order to circumvent such control, a group of people decided to initiate a separate project, departing from the lexical basis of Loglan and reinventing the whole vocabulary, which led to the current lexicon of Lojban. In effect they established in 1987 The Logical Language Group, based in Washington, D.C. They also won a trial over whether they could call their version of the language "Loglan".

Usage

As a spoken language

Lojban is practiced by its speakers in voice and text chats.

As a programming language

There've been several installments showing Lojban to be used as a declarative and as a functional programming language.

As a machine interlingua

Lojban is proposed to be used as a intermediate language in machine translation (due to it being a speakable language as well, which alleaviates proofreading of texts converted from other languages and due to its syntactic unambiguity).

Phonology and orthography

The phonetic form of Lojban gismu (root words) was created algorithmically by searching for sound patterns in words with similar meanings in world languages and by multiplying those sound patterns by the number of speakers of those languages. The list of source languages used for the algorithm was limited to the six most widely spoken languages as of 1987—Mandarin, English, w:Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and w:Arabic. This resulted in root words being in their phonetic form a relatively equal mixture of English and Mandarin, with lesser influences from the other four.

Lojban is written almost entirely with lower-case letters; upper-case letters are used to mark stress in words that do not fit the normal rules of stress assignment, or when whitespace is omitted.

Phonetic inventory

Lojban has 6 w:vowels and 17 w: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.

The letters in Lojban and their respective pronunciations are shown in the table below. The IPA symbols in parentheses indicate alternative pronunciations; preferred pronunciations have no parentheses.

Lojban consonant phonemes

		Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		mTemplate:R	nTemplate:R
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k	ʔ
	voiced	b	d		ɡ
Fricative	voiceless	f (ɸ)	s	ʃ (ʂ)	x	h (θ)
	voiced	v (β)	z	ʒ (ʐ)
Approximant			lTemplate:R
Rhotic			rTemplate:RTemplate:R

Lojban vowel phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	ɛ (e)	ə	o (ɔ)
Open	a (ɑ)

	Letters																							Auxiliary characters
IPA	a (ɑ)	b	ʃ (ʂ)	d	ɛ (e)	f (ɸ)	ɡ	i	ʒ (ʐ)	k	lTemplate:R	mTemplate:R	nTemplate:R	o (ɔ)	p	rTemplate:RTemplate:R	s	t	u	v (β)	x	ə	z	h (θ)	ʔ	.
Latin	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	r	s	t	u	v	x	y	z	'	.	,

In principle, Lojban may be written in any orthographic system as long as it satisfies the required regularities and unambiguities. Some of the reasons for such elasticity would be as follows:

1. Lojban is defined by the w:phonemes rather than graphemes; as long as they are correctly rendered so as to maintain the Lojbanic audio-visual w:isomorphism, a representational system can be said to be an appropriate orthography of the language;
2. Lojban is meant to be as culturally neutral as possible, so it is never crucial or fundamental to claim that some particular orthography of some particular languages (e.g. the Latin alphabet) should be the dominant mode.

Some Lojbanists extend this principle of cultural neutrality to claim that Lojban should eventually use its own alphabet.

Stress

Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable.

Diphthongs

There are 16 w:diphthongs (and no w:triphthongs). A distinction between diphthongs and monophthongs can be written by inserting a comma in the Latin alphabet. Vowel hiatus is also prevented by inserting an apostrophe, which usually indicates [h], though there are other valid realizations. For those who have trouble pronouncing certain w:consonant clusters, there is the option of adding vowels between them (w:epenthesis), as long as they differ sufficiently from the phonological vowels and are pronounced as short as possible. The resulting additional syllables are not factored in the grammar, including for the purposes of stress determination.

Linguistic properties

Lojban:

• is designed to express complex logical constructs precisely.
• has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling and grammar (although word derivation relies on arbitrary variant forms). This gives rise to high intelligibility for computer parsing.
• is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
• allows highly systematic learning and use, compared to most natural languages.
• possesses an intricate system of indicators which effectively communicate contextual attitude or w:emotions.

Grammar

Main article: Lojban grammar

Lojban has three word-classes: predicate words (brivla), structure words (cmavo), and name words (cmevla). 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 (rafsi) assigned to some predicate words and structure words, from which compound words (lujvo) may be created.

Lojban has also taken the set of evidential indicators from the constructed language w:Láadan.

Following the publication of The Complete Lojban Language, it was expected that "the documented lexicon would be baselined, and the combination of lexicon and reference grammar would be frozen for a minimum of 5 years while language usage grew." As scheduled, this period, which has officially been called the "freeze", expired in 2002. The speakers of Lojban are now free to construct new words and idioms, and decide where the language is heading.

Syntax and semantics

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:

The computer-tested, unambiguous rules also include grammar for 'incomplete' sentences e.g. for narrative, quotational, or mathematical phrases.

Its typology can be said to be basically w:subject–verb–object and w:subject–object–verb. However, it can practically be anything:

• mi prami do (SVO) (I love you)
• mi do prami (SOV) (By me, you are loved)
• do se prami mi (OVS) (You are loved by me)
• do mi se prami (OSV) (You, I love)
• prami fa mi do (VSO) (Loved by me, you are)
• prami do fa mi, se prami fa do mi (VOS) (Love you, I do)

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 mi prami do is determined by prami realizing, with its own predefined "place structure", a specific semantic relation between mi and do; when the positional relation between mi and do 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 is 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 sutra dansu "to quickly dance", the modifying word sutra narrows the sense of the modified word dansu to form a more specific concept (in which case the modifier may resemble English adverbs or adjectives). One could go still further, adding a quite extreme example of its syntactic flexibility.

Lojban can easily "imitate" even one-word sentences from w:polysynthetic languages, for example:

• w:Nuu-chah-nulth language: inkiwihl'minik'isit
• Gloss: inkiw (fire/burn) -ihl (in-the-house) -'minik (plural) -'is (diminutive) -'it (past-tense)

which can be expressed in Lojban the same way:

• Lojban: fagykemyzdanerso'icmapru
• Gloss: fire-type-house-inside-many-small-past-event

Lexicon

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 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) 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).

Example texts

Common phrases

Lojban	literal meaning	English
coi/co'o coi/co'o File:Jbo-coi,co'o.ogg (file)	hello/goodbye	hello!/good-bye!
pe'u pe'u File:Jbo-pe'u.ogg (file)	please	please!
ki'e ki'e File:Jbo-ki'e.ogg (file)	thanks	thanks!
.u'u u'u File:Jbo-u'u.ogg (file)	(repentance)	I'm sorry!
xu do se glibau/jbobau xu do se glibau/jbobau File:Jbo-xu do se glibau,jbobau.ogg (file)	is-it-true-that you is-a-speaker-of-English-language / is-a-speaker-of-Lojban-language	Do you speak English / Lojban?
ti/ta/tu ti/ta/tu File:Jbo-ti,ta,tu.ogg (file)	this/that/that-over-there	this one/that one/that yonder
mi na jimpe mi na jimpe File:Jbo-mi na jimpe.ogg (file)	I not-true-that understand	I don't understand
go'i go'i File:Jbo-go'i.ogg (file)	(the last clause)	yes, that's true
na go'i na go'i File:Jbo-na go'i.ogg (file)	not-true-that (the last clause)	no, that's false
la'u ma la'u ma File:Jbo-la'u ma.ogg (file)	being-a-quantity-of what?	How much, how many?
ma jdima ma jdima File:Jbo-ma jdima.ogg (file)	what is-the-price	What's the cost?
lo vimku'a cu se stuzi ma	toilet (tail of the clause follows) is-located-at what?	Where's the toilet?

Unique Lojbanic expressions

Lojban	.oi	ro'o	bu'o nai	pei
Gloss	attitudinal: pain!	in physical sense	attitude ends	what's your attitude?
Translation	Are you no longer in pain?

Lojban	mi	nelci	ko
Gloss	I	like	imperative "you"
Translation	Make it so that I like you!

Lojban	lo	cukta	ku	be'u	zvati	ma
Gloss	that which	is book(s)	end of noun phrase	attitudinal: need!	is located at	what?
Translation	I need the book! Where is it?

Lojban	ko	ga'i nai	klama	lo	nenri	be	lo	mi	zdani
Gloss	imperative "you"	attitudinal: meekness!	come to	that which	is inside of	[attach arguments of noun]	that which	my	is home
Translation	I would be honored if you would enter my residence.

Lojban	le	pa	nanmu	cu	ninmu
Gloss	the one in question which	one	is man	tail of the clause follows	is woman
Translation	The man is a woman.

Lojban	se ri'a	gi	mi	jgari	lo	djacu	gi	mi	jgari	lo	kabri
Gloss	with physical effect	of (	I	grasp	that which	is some water	)	I	grasp	that which	is cup
Translation	I grasp water, since I grasp a cup.

The North Wind and the Sun

A translation of w:The North Wind and the Sun. Template:Quotation

A Lojbanic poem (audio)

• xekri je blanu nicte

  File:Xekri je blanu nicte.ogg

  (file)

Community

The Internet

The activities of Lojban speakers are mostly via the w:Internet:

• Lojban.org: A user-maintained multilingual site, attempting to reflect a cross section of the Lojban community outside of the LLG.
• Lojban chat: Based on Telegram, Slack messengers and the Freenode w:IRC network.
• Lojban Mailing List: A beginner-oriented means to talk/learn about the language.
• Lojban subreddit: the main Lojban group in Reddit
• jbotcan.org: A community in which people may practice their Lojban, ask questions, propose Lojban-related ideas, etc.
• uikipedias: The Lojban Wikipedia, where discussions may be conversed in English.

The Logfest

Gatherings of Lojbanists have been organized in the USA annually since as early as 1990, called Logfest (in Lojban: jbonunsla). It is mostly informal, taking place on a weekend, with the only scheduled activity being the annual meeting of the LLG. Those who cannot 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 mw.lojban.org, places known to have concentration of Lojbanists are:

• Canada, Sweden, Russia, United States

Template:As of, Frappr.com shows that some people from the following countries are interested in or are enthusiasts of the language:

• Argentina, Canada, China, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Venezuela.

Below are some of the notable personalities who have contributed to the development of Lojban:

• w:Bob LeChevalier (also known as la lojbab): the founder and the President of the LLG.
• w:Robin Lee Powell (also known as la camgusmis): the author of a novel-sized story, la nicte cadzu (Night Walkers).
• w:Jorge Llambías (also known as la xorxes): one of the most active Lojbanists, having done several translations. He is also a prominent figure on the mailing list, helping beginners with the language.
• w:John W. Cowan: the author of The Complete Lojban Language.
• w:Miles Forster (also known as la selpa'i): a German Lojbanist who wrote the song ca pa djedi and made several large translations into Lojban.
• Robin Turner: a British philosopher and linguist living in Turkey, and coauthor of Lojban For Beginners.
• w:Nick Nicholas (also known as la nitcion): an Australian linguist, and coauthor of Lojban For Beginners.

Comparison with other logical languages

Loglan

Main article: Comparison between Lojban and Loglan

The principal difference between Lojban and Loglan is one of lexicon. 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 had 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 the actual 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, w:pinyin cháng), both meaning "normal".

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.

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 ' (w:apostrophe) was added with the value of [h] in the w:International Phonetic Alphabet, but its distribution is such that it can appear only w:intervocally, and in discussions of the morphology and phonotactics, it is described not as a proper consonant, but a "w:voiceless glide". (This phoneme is realized as w:θ by some speakers.)

gua\spi

gua\spi is a descendant of Loglan but is tonal, developed by Jim Carter. Instead of structure words there are in Gua\spi six different tones. Predicates have only one syllable instead of two. Some of its characteristics, including tones, phonotactics, expressions for masses vs sets, non-existence of metalinguistic negation, etc., received criticism.

See also

• Case grammar
• FrameNet
• Simplified Technical English
• Ithkuil

External links

• Lojban chats
• Reference grammar
• a searchable dictionary
  • Also available in other languages
• Learning materials
  • la karda: a distilled overview of the Lojban language
  • Wave Lessons, another popular textbook
  • Lojban courses for English speakers
  • Complete Lojban language