Lojban
Encyclopedia
See also the proposed fourth tense of 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 have 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 development.
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 is not 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:
Other translation projects include:
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:
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 does not cover JavaScript
.
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)
, the active Lojban community recognizes additional goals for the language to be attained in the future, including but not limited to:
s and 17 consonant
s. Some of them have, apart from the preferred/standard sounds, permitted variants intended to cover dissimilitude in pronunciation by speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.
Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable.
There are 16 diphthong
s (and no triphthong
s). 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 consonant cluster
s, there is the option of adding vowels between them (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.
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.
The letters in Lojban and their respective pronunciations are shown in the table below. The IPA symbols in parenthesis indicate alternative pronunciations; preferred pronunciations have no parenthesis.
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:
Some Lojbanists extend this principle to claim that even an original orthography of the language is to be sought.
This article will use the common Latin alphabet mode.
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.
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:
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 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 further, adding a quite extreme example of its syntactical flexibility.
Lojban can easily "imitate" even Amerindian one-word sentences like this one:
The Nuu-chah-nulth 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:
by Nick Nicholas, used in comparative IPA realizations.
:
According to Lojban.org, places known to have concentration of Lojbanists are:
Also Frappr.com shows that, as of August 2007, some people from the following countries are interested in or enthusiasts of the language:
It is generally noticed that there is 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:
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 is 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 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 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 is not definitive; it is 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 is not 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 is 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 does not seem to have had such a system.
(UNL), Esperanto
, Visual Basic
, Dutton's Speedwords, Ceqli and Gua\spi. It is designed to be more single-syllable oriented. If possible, that would nonetheless lead Lojsk to be more sensitive to noisy environments than Lojban is, therefore its practicality in oral communication may be questioned.
Like most languages with few speakers, Lojban lacks much of an associated body of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
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 have 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 development.
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 is not 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
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
, novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, and academic writing
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
. This has been paralleled with a chrestomathy
Chrestomathy
Chrestomathy is a collection of choice literary passages, used especially as an aid in learning a foreign language.In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader or anthology which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or...
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 author Lewis CarrollLewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
- One Thousand and One Nights
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Chapter 1) by the science fiction writer Robert A. HeinleinRobert A. HeinleinRobert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
- The Prophet by the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran
- The Little Things by the short story writer/poet Raymond CarverRaymond CarverRaymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s....
- The Man and the Snake by the short story writer/satirist Ambrose BierceAmbrose BierceAmbrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...
- The Book by the cosmic horror writer H. P. LovecraftH. P. LovecraftHoward Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
- The Book of EstherBook of EstherThe Book of Esther is a book in the Ketuvim , the third section of the Jewish Tanakh and is part of the Christian Old Testament. The Book of Esther or the Megillah is the basis for the Jewish celebration of Purim...
from the BibleBibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
Other translation projects include:
- Eaton Interface: a translation of the Helen Eaton concept list into Lojban.
- Parliamentary Rules: Lojban terms for parliamentary actionsParliamentary procedureParliamentary procedure is the body of rules, ethics, and customs governing meetings and other operations of clubs, organizations, legislative bodies, and other deliberative assemblies...
. - Lojban Adventure: a Lojban version of the classic Colossal CaveColossal Cave AdventureColossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
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) 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).
Development of learning aids
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)
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 does not cover JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
.
Community development
Currently, Lojban's learning resources available on the internet are available mainly to 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 hypothesisLinguistic relativity
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
, 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 LanguageInternational auxiliary languageAn international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
- Use as a potential academic language, such as in science or philosophy
- Use as an educational toolEducationEducation in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
- Research in linguisticsLinguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
- Research in artificial intelligence and machine understandingArtificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
- Improved human-computer communication, storage ontologiesOntologyOntology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
, and computer translation of natural language textTranslationTranslation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of... - Improved human-human communication, due to the logical and unambiguous structure and greater means of expression
Phonology and orthography
Lojban has 6 vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s and 17 consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s. Some of them have, apart from the preferred/standard sounds, permitted variants intended to cover dissimilitude in pronunciation by speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.
Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable.
There are 16 diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s (and no triphthong
Triphthong
In phonetics, a triphthong is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement of the articulator from one vowel quality to another that passes over a third...
s). 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 consonant cluster
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....
s, there is the option of adding vowels between them (epenthesis
Epenthesis
In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....
), 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.
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.
The letters in Lojban and their respective pronunciations are shown in the table below. The IPA symbols in parenthesis indicate alternative pronunciations; preferred pronunciations have no parenthesis.
| Consonants | Auxiliary characters | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPA representation | b | ʃ (ʂ) |
d | f (ɸ) |
ɡ | ʒ (ʐ) |
k | l | m | n | p | r | s | t | v (β) |
x | z | h | ʔ | . |
| Latin Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome... |
b | c | d | f | g | j | k | l | m | n | p | r | s | t | v | x | z | ' | . | , |
| Vowels | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPA representation | a (ɑ) |
e (ɛ) |
i | o (ɔ) |
u | ə |
| Latin | a | e | i | o | u | y |
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:
- Lojban is defined by the phonemes rather than graphemes; as long as they are correctly rendered so as to maintain the Lojbanic audio-visual isomorphismIsomorphismIn abstract algebra, an isomorphism is a mapping between objects that shows a relationship between two properties or operations. If there exists an isomorphism between two structures, the two structures are said to be isomorphic. In a certain sense, isomorphic structures are...
, 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 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 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 three word-classes: predicate words (brivla), structure words (cmavo), and name words (cmene). 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 predicate words and structure words, from which compound words (lujvo) may be created.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.
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
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
can be said to be basically subject–verb–object and 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 (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 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).
- English: 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)
One could go still further, adding a quite extreme example of its syntactical flexibility.
Lojban can easily "imitate" even Amerindian one-word sentences like this one:
- Nuu-chah-nulth languageNuu-chah-nulth languageNuu-chah-nulth is a Wakashan language spoken in the Pacific Northwest of North America, on the west coast of Vancouver Island from Barkley Sound to Quatsino Sound in British Columbia, by the Nuu-chah-nulth people...
: inikwihl'minik'isit - 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 Nuu-chah-nulth 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
Common phrases
| Lojban | literal meaning | English |
|---|---|---|
| coi/co'o | [greetings!]/[farewell!] | hello/good-bye |
| pe'u | [please!] | please |
| ki'e | [thankful!] | thank you |
| .u'u | [repentance!] | 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/tu | this-here/that-here/that-there | this one/that one/that yonder |
| mi na jimpe | I [false] understand | I don't understand |
| go'i | the-last-sentence | yes/That's true; |
| na go'i | [false] the-last-sentence | 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
- .oiro'o bu'onai pei
[physical pain!] [end emotion] [?]
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
I need the book! Where is 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 would enter my residence. - le nanmu cu ninmu
one-or-more-specific-things-which-I-describe-as "men" are women
The man/men is a/are 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.
I grasp water, since I grasp the cup.
The North Wind and the Sun
A translation of The North Wind and the SunThe North Wind and the Sun
The North Wind and the Sun is one of Aesop's Fables . It is type 298 in the Aarne-Thompson folktale classification.-The story and its application:...
by Nick Nicholas, used in comparative IPA realizations.
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
- le jbijbejbo cu cpucpacpe le jbajbu le cpicpare
- lo la santas santa'a santa
The Internet
The activities of Lojban speakers are mostly via the InternetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 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 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 the 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 is 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 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 is known to be excessively modest). He has done 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, la nicte cadzu (Night Walkers).
- Robin Turner: a British philosopher and linguist living in Turkey. He is the coauthor of Lojban For Beginners.
Loglan
LoglanLoglan
Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning...
is now a generic term that refers both to James Cooke Brown
James Cooke Brown
Dr. James Cooke Brown was a sociologist and science fiction author. He is notable for creating the artificial language Loglan and for designing the Parker Brothers board game Careers....
'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 is 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 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 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
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
常, pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
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
Yacc
The computer program yacc is a parser generator developed by Stephen C. Johnson at AT&T for the Unix operating system. The name is an acronym for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler." It generates a parser based on an analytic grammar written in a notation similar to BNF.Yacc used to be available as...
, with a few formal "pre-processing" rules. Loglan also has a machine grammar, but it is not definitive; it is 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
Linguistic meaning
The nature of meaning, its definition, elements, and types, was discussed by philosophers Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. According to them 'meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean '. One term in the relationship of meaning necessarily...
of lexeme
Lexeme
A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...
. 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 is not really a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
, but a kind of modifier-modificand relationship, similar to that of a noun adjunct
Noun adjunct
In grammar, a noun adjunct or attributive noun or noun premodifier is a noun that modifies another noun and is optional — meaning that it can be removed without changing the grammar of the sentence; it is a noun functioning as an adjective. For example, in the phrase "chicken soup" the 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
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
) was added with the value of [h] in the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
, but its distribution is such that it can appear only intervocally, and in discussions of the morphology and phonotactics, it is described not as a proper consonant, but a "voiceless glide". (This phoneme is realized as [θ] by some speakers.) A rigid phonotactical
Phonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
system was made for Lojban, but Loglan does not seem to have had such a system.
Lojsk
Lojsk was conceived by Ari Reyes, heavily influenced by Loglan, Lojban, Universal Networking LanguageUniversal Networking Language
Universal Networking Language is a declarative formal language specifically designed to represent semantic data extracted from natural language texts...
(UNL), Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, Visual Basic
Visual Basic
Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...
, Dutton's Speedwords, Ceqli and Gua\spi. It is designed to be more single-syllable oriented. If possible, that would nonetheless lead Lojsk to be more sensitive to noisy environments than Lojban is, therefore its practicality in oral communication may be questioned.
Voksigid
Voksigid, created by an Internet working group led 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. It uses an extensive set of very semantically specific prepositions to mark the roles of verb arguments, instead of positional order as in Loglan and Lojban.Gua\spi
Gua\spi 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 Gua\spi's predecessors they take a lot of syllables to say things, albeit at the expense of adding tone, which is a far from universal language trait.External links
General
Personal blogs
- lo cunso selpeisku
- le karni be fi la camgusmis by Robin Lee Powell
- C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E. by Matt Arnold (direct link to his Lojbanic contents)
Beginner
- Lojban: A Logical Language by Robin Turner
- What is Lojban? by John Cowan and Nick Nicholas
- Lojban For Beginners by Robin Turner and Nick Nicholas
- Everyday Lojban by Lojban.org
- Google Wave Lessons
- jboski: an online Lojban-to-English translator by LLG
- Parallel 2: a free program for parallel reading and listening, based on the implicit learning approachImplicit learningImplicit learning is learning of complex information in an incidental manner, without awareness of what has been learned. It may require a certain minimal amount of attention and may depend on attentional and working memory mechanisms...
- jMemorize:
- Popup.app: a GNUstep based vocabulary learning tool that can use cmafi'e to extract the vocabulary from a given text.
- Quizlet:
- Lojbanic Number Trainer: a simple web tool
- Xah's Logical Language Page: A brief introduction + some word categories
- Software Assisted Learning: miscellaneous software listed on Lojban.org
- Basic Lojban picture wordlist: a list of picturable gismu on the Lojban Wikipedia
- Tatoeba.org's List of Lojban Sentences with Translations
Advanced
- gimste: a full list of Lojban gismu
- Diagrammed Summary of Lojban Grammar Forms with Example Sentences by LLG
- The Lojban Reference Grammar by John Cowan
- The Level 0 Booklet
- Using UML to understand Lojban
- jbovlaste: an official Lojban dictionary project
- The Lojban Wikipedia
Poetry
- xirli'u selsanga: a poem by Federico Garca Lorca, translated by xorxes
- skanunydji: by Michael Helsem
- sipna pemci: by Arnt Richard Johansen
- Lojban Poetry – Tengwar script: by .aulun.
- Lojban Haikus – Hiragana script: by xorxes. & .aulun.
- Lojban Haikus – Hiragana script: by .aulun.
- Goethe: nicte selsa'a be le dzuli'u: by .aulun.