Lojban Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Lojban logo
The language itself shares many of the features and goals of Loglan; in particular
- The grammar is based on predicate logic, and is capable of expressing complex logical constructs precisely.
- It has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling or grammar, so it can be easily parsed by computer.
- Lojban is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
- It is, nonetheless, simple to learn and use compared to many natural languages.
- 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
| Table of contents |
|
2 Lojban grammar 3 Lojban compared to the Loglan of TLI 4 The Lojban logo 5 External links and references |
Pronunciation
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 letters. 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 optional whether only 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.
Some of the letters have multiple permitted realisations. Note in particular that Lojban vowels can be either rounded or unrounded. Typical realisations are given in the following table:
| Letter | X-SAMPA | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ' | [h], [T] | an unvoiced glottal or dental fricative |
| , | ||
| the syllable separator | ||
| . | [?] | a glottal stop or a pause |
| a | [a], [A] | an open vowel |
| b | [b] | a voiced bilabial stop |
| c | [S], [s`] | an unvoiced coronal sibilant |
| d | [d] | a voiced dental/alveolar stop |
| e | [E], [e] | a front mid vowel |
| f | [f], [p\\] | an unvoiced labial fricative |
| g | [g] | a voiced velar stop |
| i | [i] | a front close vowel |
| j | [Z],[z`] | a voiced coronal sibilant |
| k | [k] | an unvoiced velar stop |
| l | [l], [l=] | a voiced lateral approximant (may be syllabic) |
| m | [m], [m=] | a voiced bilabial nasal (may be syllabic) |
| n | [n], [n=], [N], [N=] | a voiced dental or velar nasal (may be syllabic) |
| o | [o], [O] | a back mid vowel |
| p | [p] | an unvoiced bilabial stop |
| r | [r], [r\\], [4], [R\\], [r=], [r\\=], [4=], [R\\=] | a rhotic sound |
| s | [s] | an unvoiced alveolar sibilant |
| t | [t] | an unvoiced dental/alveolar stop |
| u | [u] | a back close vowel |
| v | [v], [B] | a voiced labial fricative |
| x | [x] | an unvoiced velar fricative |
| y | [@] | a central mid vowel |
| z | [z] | a voiced alveolar sibilant |
Two frequent combinations are the affricates tc [tS] and dj [dZ], which represent one sound (phoneme) each in English but are considered a combination of two phonemes in Lojban.
Lojban grammar
Lojban has three parts of speech: one (called brivla) for both common nouns and verbs, one (called cmene) for proper nouns, and another (called cmavo) for structural particles: articles, numerals, tense indicators and other such modifiers. The cmavo are further subdivided into selma'o, which are closer to the notion of parts of speech (e.g. UI includes interjections and discursives). There are no adjectives or adverbs in the sense that Indo-European languages have them. The articles inflect to indicate individual, mass, set, or typical element. Brivla do not inflect for tense, person, or number; tense is indicated by separate cmavo, but grammatical number is absent. All brivla, except for a handful of borrowings such as alga, have at least five letters.
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; all brivla are 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. 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. 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 "I am taller than you"; but this could also be expressed as something like 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"
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?This 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 catcher", which can mean either a big person who catches dogs or a person who catches big dogs. In Lojban, unless you clearly specify otherwise with cmavo, such modifiers always group left-to-right, so "big dog catcher" is a catcher of big dogs, and a "broken light bulb" is a bulb that emits broken light (you can also avoid the ambiguity by creating a new word, so "broken lightbulb" has the intended meaning).
A: Two: one to decide what to change it into, and one to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.
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. By
then, though, 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 were 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 common spoken languages on Earth, which was then
multiplied with 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 manier sounds taken from Chinese.
For instance, the Loglan word norma is equivalent to the Lojban word
cnano, 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 typology section above holds true for Loglan as
well. Most simple, declarative sentences could be translated word by
word between the two languages; however, 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; the grammar of Loglan 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 between the terminology used in English
to talk about the two languages. In his writings, James Cooke Brown used
many terms based on English, Latin and Greek, some of which were already
established with a slightly different meaning. The Lojban camp, on the
other hand, freely borrowed grammatical terms from Lojban itself. Thus,
for what linguists would call roots or root words,
loglanists say primitives or prims, and lojbanists say
gismu. The lexeme of Loglan and selma'o of Lojban has
nothing to do with the linguistic meaning of lexeme. It is
really a kind of part of speech, a subdivision of the set of
grammatical words, or particles, which by loglanists are called little words
and by lojbanists cmavo. There is a grammatical construct in
Loglan and Lojban that is called, respectively, metaphor and
tanru; this is not really a metaphor per se, but a kind of
modifier-modificand relationship of which a noun-noun construction is an
example. A borrowed word in Loglan is simply called a borrowing; 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 IPA [h], 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.
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.
This is an Article on Lojban. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Lojban Lojban compared to the Loglan of TLI
Note, 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, still
calls its language Loglan, it is necessary to state that we in this
section are referring to the TLI language, instead of the entire family
of languages.The Lojban 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.External links and references