Lojban

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Lojban la lojban.
Logo:
Pronunciation:	IPA: /la ˈloʒban/
Created by:	Logical Language Group	1987
Setting and usage:	A logically engineered language for various usages
Total speakers:	—
Category (purpose):	constructed languages  engineered languages   logical languages (descended from Loglan)    Lojban
Writing system:	Latin alphabet
Category (sources):	constructed languages  mixed a priori/a posteriori
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	jbo
ISO 639-3:	jbo
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Lojban (IPA /ˈloʒban/, official full name Lojban: a realization of Loglan) is a predicate logic-based constructed logical language. The Logical Language Group started developing Lojban in 1987 as an offshoot of Loglan with the intent of realizing the latter's purposes while also making the language more complete, usable, and freely available.

Contents 1 Scope, features, and goals 2 The Big Red Book 3 Orthography and phonology 4 Grammar 4.1 gismu 4.2 rafsi 4.2.1 Examples 4.3 selbri 4.3.1 Example 4.4 sumti 4.5 Attitudinal indicators 5 Samples 5.1 Common phrases 6 Community 6.1 Activities 7 Lojban compared to the Loglan of TLI 8 Name 9 Logo 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links

[edit] Scope, features, and goals

Lojban shares many of the features and goals of Loglan:

• Has a grammar that is based on predicate logic, and is capable of expressing complex logical constructs precisely.
• Has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling or grammar, so it can be easily parsed by computer
• Is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
• Is simple to learn and use compared to many natural languages.
• Possesses an intricate system of attitudinal indicators which effectively communicate contextual emotion.

While the initial goal of the Loglan project was to investigate the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the active Lojban community has additional goals for the language, including

• General research into linguistics
• Research in artificial intelligence and machine understanding
• Improved human-computer communication, storage ontologies, and computer translation of natural language text
• Use of language as an educational tool
• Personal creativity

Like most languages with few speakers, Lojban lacks much of an associated body of literature.

[edit] The Big Red Book

All orthology, phonology, morphology, syntax and grammar of the language are thoroughly defined in the official LLG book by John Woldemar Cowan, The Complete Lojban Language, from 1997, very often referred to as The Big Red Book, due to its appearance – or simply CLL.

[edit] Orthography and phonology

The Lojban alphabet consists of the 26 characters ' , . a b c d e f g i j k l m n o p r s t u v x y z; that is, it consists of the Latin alphabet without the three letters h q w but with three additional symbols: the apostrophe, comma, and full stop (period). The alphabetical order is as shown above, which is (intentionally) the same as the sort order of those characters in ASCII.

Capital letters are also used, but only to mark a stressed syllable in a word when the stress is on a non-standard syllable (for example, in proper names). Capital letters are not considered separate letters of the alphabet. It is arbitrary whether the stressed vowel or the entire stressed syllable is capitalised; for example, the name "Josephine" could be rendered as either DJOzefin. or djOzefin. Without the capitalisation, the ordinary rules of Lojban stress would cause the 'ze' syllable to be stressed instead.

Lojban does not have any mandatory punctuation marks. Special words are used to represent text and sentence structure, questions, exclamations, and attitudes.^[1]

Some Lojban letters have multiple permitted realisations or allophones. In particular, vowels can be either rounded or unrounded, while the consonants can be either aspirated or unaspirated, but in general not palatalized. The following table shows typical realisations of the written characters using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA):

Letter	IPA	Description
'	h, θ	an unvoiced glottal fricative or unvoiced dental fricative
,	.	the syllable separator
.	ʔ	a glottal stop or a pause
a	a, ɑ	an open vowel
b	b	a voiced bilabial stop
c	ʃ, ʂ	a voiceless coronal sibilant
d	d	a voiced dental stop or voiced alveolar stop
e	ɛ, e	a front mid vowel
f	f, ɸ	a voiceless labial fricative
g	g	a voiced velar stop
i, before vowel	j	a palatal glide
i, otherwise	i	a front close vowel
j	ʒ, ʐ	a voiced coronal sibilant
k	k	a voiceless velar stop
l	l, l̩	a voiced lateral approximant (may be syllabic)
m	m, m̩	a voiced bilabial nasal (may be syllabic)
n	n, n̩, ŋ, ŋ̩	a voiced dental nasal or voiced velar nasal (may be syllabic)
o	o, ɔ	a back mid vowel
p	p	a voiceless bilabial stop
r	r, ɹ, ɾ, ʀ, r ̩, ɹ̩, ɾ̩, ʀ̩	a rhotic sound (may be syllabic)
s	s	a voiceless alveolar sibilant
t	t	a voiceless dental stop or voiceless alveolar stop
u, before vowel	w	a labial glide
u, otherwise	u	a back close vowel
v	v, β	a voiced labial fricative
x	x	a voiceless velar fricative
y	ə	a central mid vowel
z	z	a voiced alveolar sibilant

In this table, the first IPA symbol represents the recommended pronunciation, except for the case of <r>, where all alternatives are equally acceptable.^[2] The voiceless stops /p/, /t/ and /k/ are usually aspirated, but need not be.

The affricates /ʤ/ (the voiced postalveolar affricate), /d͡z/ (the voiced alveolar affricate), /tʃ/ (the voiceless postalveolar affricate) and /t͡s/ (the voiceless alveolar affricate) also occur in Lojban, but are each considered to be a combination of the two appropriate phonemes in Lojban (being the realization of <dj>, <dz>, <tc> and <ts>, respectively).

The combinations <ai>, <au>, <ei> and <oi> are all realized as the corresponding falling diphthongs. To force these sounds to be pronounced separately as monophthongs a comma can be put between them. Lojban does not have triphthongs.

For those who, given their native language background, may have trouble pronouncing (certain) consonant clusters, there is 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. Possible choices include [ɪ], [ɨ], [ʊ] and [ʏ] (but not [y], which is the rounded counterpart of [i] and thus a valid realization of <i>). The resulting added syllables are completely ignored by the grammar, including for the purposes of stress determination.

[edit] Grammar

Lojban has three parts of speech:

• brivla: for both common nouns and verbs. All brivla, except for a handful of borrowings such as alga, have at least five letters.
• cmene: for proper nouns
• cmavo: for structural particles: articles, numerals, tense indicators and other such modifiers. The articles also inflect to indicate individual, mass, set, or typical element. Cmavo are further subdivided into:
  • selma'o, which are closer to the notion of parts of speech (e.g. UI includes interjections and discursives).

Brivla do not inflect for tense, person, or number; tense is indicated by separate cmavo, but grammatical number is absent. There are no adjectives or adverbs in the sense that Indo-European languages have them.

As befits a logical language, there is a large assortment of conjunctions. Logical conjunctions take different forms depending on whether they connect sumti (the equivalent of noun phrases), selbri (phrases that can serve as verbs; every brivla can act as a selbri), parts of a tanru (a construct whose closest English equivalent is a string of nouns), or clauses in a sentence.

The typology is Subject Verb Object, with Subject Object Verb also common. Word formation is synthetic; many basic five-letter brivla (called gismu) have one to three three-letter forms called rafsi which are used in making longer brivla called lujvo. For example, gasnu means "to make something happen"; its rafsi -gau regularly forms compounds meaning "to cause x", in which the agent is in the subject place of the new predicate.

Lojban has a positional case system, though this can be overridden by marking predicate arguments with explicit "modal particles" (ie. prepositions). For instance bramau means "is bigger than"; the bigger thing is in first position, and the smaller is second, and the measured property in the third (see also postfix notation). So mi bramau do le ka clani means "I am bigger than you in the property of height" or, colloquially, "I am taller than you"; but this could also be expressed as fi le ka clani fe do fa mi bramau, "In height, you are exceeded by me".

• le cinfo cu bramau le mlatu = "The lion is bigger than the cat"
• mi bramaugau le cinfo le mlatu = "I make the lion bigger than the cat"

What a particular place means depends entirely on the brivla. For animals and plants the second place is the species, variety, breed, or other taxon; for verbs of measurement it is the numerical measurement, and a further place is the standard; for klama ("go"/"come") it is the destination.

Something of the flavor of Lojban (and Loglan) can be imparted by this lightbulb joke:

Q: How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?
A: Two: one to decide what to change it into, and one to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.

This joke makes use of two features of the language; first, the language attempts to eliminate polysemy; that is, having a phrase with more than one meaning. So while the English word "change" can mean "to transform into a different state", or "to replace", or even "small-denomination currency", Lojban has different words for each. In particular, the use of a brivla such as the word for "change" ("binxo") implies that all of its predicate places exist, so there must be something for it to change into. Another feature of the language is that it has no grammatical ambiguities that appear in English phrases like "big dog house", which can mean either a big house for dogs or a house of big dogs. In Lojban, unless you clearly specify otherwise with cmavo, such modifiers always group left-to-right, so "big dog house" is a house of big dogs, and a "broken light bulb" is a bulb that emits broken light (you can achieve the desired meaning with the appropriate cmavo or by creating a new word, in effect saying "broken lightbulb").

[edit] gismu

gismu constitute the lexical base of the language. Each gismu is a five-letter selbri either of the form CVCCV or CCVCV where C stands for a consonant and V for a vowel. There are 1342 canonical gismu. Various experimental gismu have been proposed, but none of them have become canonical (arguably every word that cannot be directly expressed as a single gismu may be expressed as a lujvo (a combination of rafsi) or a fu'ivla).

Like other selbri, each gismu can have a number of sumti (or arguments), varying from 1 to 5.

[edit] rafsi

A rafsi is a special form of a word, that can be combined with other rafsi to create new predicate words (selbri) and names. All Lojban root words (gismu) and many short service words (cmavo) have rafsi.

[edit] Examples

• The name Lojban itself is a combination of loj and ban, the rafsi of logji (logical) and bangu (language), respectively.
• The word sampli (computer user) is a combination of sam and pli, the rafsi of skami (computer) and pilno (user), respectively.

[edit] selbri

A selbri is a required component of bridi, expressing a relation between its sumti (arguments). Every selbri has an ordered set of its sumti, each having a semantic interpretation.

[edit] Example

• do tcidu lo cukta In this bridi, meaning You're reading a book, {tcidu} is the selbri, and {do} and {lo cukta} are its sumti.

[edit] sumti

Every sentence represents one or more bridi, or statements. Each bridi consists of a selbri, or relation, between sumti, or its arguments. Semantically, every sumti is a description of an object, concept, event, abstraction or anything else that can be referred to.

[edit] Attitudinal indicators

An attitudinal indicator (cnima'o) is a word which allows the speaker to easily express their feelings or emotions towards something. The most basic of them are simple vowel combinations. For example, ".iu" means love and ".ui" means happy. They may be made opposite by adding "nai" to the end of the word, so hate is .iunai and unhappy is .uinai.

Usefully, they may easily be combined to create words, for example, .iu.uinai, "I am unhappily in love".

[edit] Samples

• "The Lord's Prayer" in Lojban:

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 lidne 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

• "xekri je blanu nicte (help·info)", a Lojbanic poem

[edit] Common phrases

Translation	Phrase	IPA	Remarks
Lojban	la lojban	/la ˈloʒban/
hello	coi	/ʃoj/
good-bye	co'o	/ˈʃoho/
please	pe'u	/ˈpɛhu/
thank you	ki'e	/ˈkihɛ/
that one	ta	/ta/
how much?	la'u ma	/ˈlahu ma/
what's the cost?	ma jdima	/ma ˈʒdima/
English	le glibau	/lɛ ˈglibaw/
yes	.i go'i	/ʔi ˈgohi/	("what you said")
no	.i na go'i	/ʔi na ˈgohi/	("not what you said")
sorry	.u'u	/ˈʔuhu/
I don't understand	mi na jimpe	/mi na ˈʒimpɛ/
Where's the bathroom?	ma stuzi lo vimku'a	/ma ˈstuzi lɛ vimˈkuha/
Do you speak English?	xu do se bangu le glibau	/xu do sɛ ˈbangu la/

[edit] Community

The Lojban speaking community consists of about 50 active members^{[citation needed]} who are more or less involved in writing, reading and communicating in the language. Many more people who become interested in Lojban first later become inactive for various reasons, including lack of time and lack of rich educational materials (especially for non-English speaking people)^{[citation needed]}. Most active members are native English-speakers living in the United States, but some are from Norway, Argentina, Russia and other countries.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Activities

The activities of Lojban speakers are mostly via the Internet, and take place in various mailing lists, the IRC channel, Lojban Tiki and in Lojban Wikipedia. North American Lojbanists also have the opportunity to participate in annual Logfests (or jbonunsla), where Lojbanists meet together and speak in and about Lojban.

[edit] Lojban compared to the Loglan of TLI

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 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 has 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.

[edit] Name

The name of the language, Lojban, is a combination of {loj} and {ban}, which are the short forms (rafsi) of the words "logji" and "bangu", meaning "logic" and "language", respectively.

[edit] Logo

The Lojban logo is the result of a poll of the members of the LLG, and is defined as a Cartesian coordinate system superimposed on a Venn diagram. This definition does not mention color, but it is traditionally reproduced with the coordinate system in red and the Venn diagram in blue.

While no official explanation of its symbolism exists, one might reasonably suppose that the Venn diagram stands for predicate logic, while the coordinate system represents rationality, mathematics and the natural sciences.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Nicholas, Nick; Cowan, John Woldemar. What is Lojban?. Fairfax, Virginia: The Logical Language Group, 2003. ISBN 0-9660283-1-7
2. ^ Cowan, John Woldemar. The Complete Lojban Language. Fairfax, Virginia: The Logical Language Group, 1997. ISBN 0-9660283-0-9

[edit] References

• Goertzel, Ben: Potential Computational Linguistics Resources for Lojban. Self-published, March 6, 2005. [1]
• Speer, Rob; Havasi, Catherine: Meeting the Computer Halfway: Language Processing in the Artificial Language Lojban. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. [2]
• Lojban vs Loglan comparison
• Lojban with attitude!. Lojban for Beginners. Retrieved on June 29, 2007.

[edit] External links

• The Logical Language Group home page
• Lojban dictionary project
• Lojban: A Logical Language
• xkcd webcomic featuring Lojban
• A full list of Lojban gismu
• Lojban Introductory Lessons