Lojban

Key takeaways

Lojban belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lojban to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lojban from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban] ) is a logical, constructed human language created by the Logical Language Group, which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. 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 The New York Times, 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." 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.

History

Etymology The name "Lojban" means "logical language". It is a compound formed from loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language), respectively. In Lojban, a compound is called a lujvo and short forms like those (used especially to form compounds) are called rafsi.

Origins from Loglan Lojban's predecessor, Loglan, a language invented by 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 linguistic relativism). As Brown started to claim his copyright on the language's components, bans were put on the language community's activities to stop changes to aspects of the language. In order to circumvent such control, a group of Loglan users 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. To this effect, they established the Logical Language Group in 1987, based in Washington, D.C. They also won a trial over whether they could call their version of the language Loglan.

Divergence from Loglan 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 weighting 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, namely Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and 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 also utilizes a set of evidential indicators adapted from the constructed language 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 five 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.

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

Bob LeChevalier (also known as la lojbab): the founder and the President of the LLG. Robin Lee Powell (also known as la camgusmis): the author of a novel-sized story, la nicte cadzu (Night Walkers). 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. John W. Cowan: the author of The Complete Lojban Language. 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. Nick Nicholas (also known as la nitcion): an Australian linguist, and coauthor of Lojban For Beginners.

Learning resources 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 (CLL, also known as The Red Book because of its color, and The Codex Woldemar, after its author), 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:

Different textbooks, presentations to help learn Lojban la muplis, an application listing Lojban sentences from the Tatoeba database with their translation to other languages Parser: la ilmentufa (also includes experimental grammar), la camxes (by Robin Lee Powell and Jorge Llambías), la jbofi'e (by Richard Curnow) Database: la jbovlaste (initial version by Jay Kominek) Lojban's learning resources on the internet are available mainly to speakers of English, French, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Esperanto, to varying degrees.

Applications While the initial aim of the Loglan project was to investigate linguistic relativity, the active Lojban community recognizes additional applications for the language, including:

Improved human–human communication, due to the logical and unambiguous structure and greater means of expression (use as a speakable language) Eliminating syntactic ambiguity in language Use as an educational tool Research in artificial intelligence and machine understanding Improved human–computer communication, storage ontologies, and computer translation of natural language text Research in linguistics Use as an academic language, such as in science or philosophy

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lojban

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lojban claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lojban before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lojban ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lojban

In research: Lojban appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lojban in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lojban is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1987 introductions, Analytic languages, Constructed languages, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lojban outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Lojban in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lojban means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Lojban out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lojban in simple terms?

Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban] ) is a logical, constructed human language created by the Logical Language Group, which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project.

Why does Lojban matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lojban?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lojban.