Lojban: Difference between revisions

'''Lojban''' (pronounced {{IPA|ˈloʒban||jbo-lojban.ogg}}) is a conlang, [[w:Syntactic ambiguity|syntactically unambiguous]] human language<!-- based on [[w:predicate logic]]--> 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."<ref>{{cite news |date=March 10, 2010 |url=http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/questions-answered-invented-languages/ |title=Questions Answered: Invented Languages |publisher=The New York Times Schott's Vocab blog}}</ref>

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 [[w:Linguistic relativity|Sapir–Whorf hypothesis]]).

As Brown started to claim his copyright<ref>{{cite web|url=http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/why-i-like.html|title=Why I like Lojban|work=nvg.org}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan|title=AI Newsletter|work=ainewsletter.com|access-date=2012-04-27|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111223111830/http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan|archive-date=2011-12-23|url-status=dead}}</ref> 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".<ref>Johansen, Arnt Richard. [http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/why-i-like.html ''Why I like Lojban''] (accessed August 2007)</ref>

The letters in Lojban and their respective pronunciations are shown in the table below. The [[w:International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]] symbols in parentheses indicate alternative pronunciations; preferred pronunciations have no parentheses.