John Woldemar Cowan

“ Finally, there are the cultural gismu, which are also borrowed, but by modifying a word from one particular language, instead of using the multi-lingual gismu creation algorithm. Cultural gismu are used for words that have local importance to a particular culture; other cultures or languages may have no word for the concept at all, or may borrow the word from its home culture, just as Lojban does. In such a case, the gismu algorithm, which uses weighted averages, doesn't accurately represent the frequency of usage of the individual concept. ”

“ There are actually three levels of stress – primary, secondary, and weak. Weak stress is the lowest level, so it really means no stress at all. Weak stress is required for syllables containing y, a syllabic consonant, or a buffer vowel.
Primary stress is required on the penultimate syllable of Lojban content words (called brivla) . Lojbanized names may be stressed on any syllable, but if a syllable other than the penultimate is stressed, the syllable (or at least its vowel) must be capitalized in writing. Lojban structural words (called cmavo) may be stressed on any syllable or none at all. ”

“ In building a lujvo, the first step is to replace each gismu with a rafsi that uniquely represents that gismu. These rafsi are then attached together by fixed rules that allow the resulting compound to be recognized as a single word and to be analyzed in only one way.
There are three other complications; only one is serious.
The first is that there is usually more than one rafsi that can be used for each gismu. The one to be used is simply whichever one sounds or looks best to the speaker or writer. There are usually many valid combinations of possible rafsi. ”

“ Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguously resolves its sounds into words. Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn. Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words. Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exceptions. Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication. Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical. Lojban has been demonstrated in translation and in original works of prose and poetry. ”

“ For Lojban purposes, a vowel sound is a relatively long speech-sound that forms the nucleus of a syllable. Consonant sounds are relatively brief and normally require an accompanying vowel sound in order to be audible. Consonants may occur at the beginning or end of a syllable, around the vowel, and there may be several consonants in a cluster in either position. Each separate vowel sound constitutes a distinct syllable; consonant sounds do not affect the determination of syllables. ”

“ If a lujvo is invented which involves the same tanru as one that is in the dictionary, and is assigned a different meaning (or even just a different place structure) , linguistic drift results. This isn't necessarily bad. Every natural language does it. But in communication, when you use a meaning different from the dictionary definition, someone else may use the dictionary and therefore misunderstand you. You can use the cmavo za'e (explained in Section 19.11 (p. 460) ) before a newly coined lujvo to indicate that it may have a non-dictionary meaning. ”

“ There is no way to tell just by looking at the phrase “lemon tree” exactly what it refers to, even if you know the meanings of “lemon” and “tree” by themselves. As English-speakers, we must simply know that it refers to “a tree which bears lemons as fruits”. A person who didn't know English very well might think of it as analogous to “brown tree” and wonder, “What kind of tree is lemon-colored?” ”

“ Example 5.25 You are a very large dog-catcher. In Example 5.25 (p. 83) , the selbri is a tanru with seltau mutce bo barda and tertau gerku bo kavbu. It is worth emphasizing once again that this tanru has the same fundamental ambiguity as all other Lojban tanru: the sense in which the “dog type-of capturer” is said to be “very type-of large” is not precisely specified. Presumably it is his body which is large, but theoretically it could be one of his other properties. ”

“ Instead, language change will take place in the form of new vocabulary – Lojban does not yet have nearly the vocabulary it needs to be a fully usable language of the modern world, as Chapter 12 (p. 263) explains – and through the irregular natural processes of drift and (who knows?) native-speaker evolution. (Teach your children Lojban!) You can learn the language described here with assurance that (unlike previous versions of Lojban and Loglan, as well as most other artificial languages) it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters. ”

“ The same part of speech is used to represent the relationship. In formal logic this whole structure is called a “predication”; in Lojban it is called a bridi, and the central part of speech is the selbri. Logicians refer to the things thus related as “arguments”, while Lojbanists call them sumti. These Lojban terms will be used for the rest of the book.
In a relationship, there are a definite number of things being related. In English, for example, “give” has three places: the donor, the recipient and the gift. For example:
Example 2.4 John gives Sam the book. ”

“ It is important to understand that even though cmavo, lojbo, and lujvo were made up from parts of other gismu, they are now full-fledged gismu used in exactly the same way as all other gismu, both in grammar and in word formation.
The following three groups of gismu represent concepts drawn from the international language of science and mathematics. They are used for concepts that are represented in most languages by a root which is recognized internationally. ”

“ As a brivla, a lujvo must also contain a consonant cluster within the first five letters – this ensures that they cannot be mistaken for compound cmavo. Of course, all lujvo have at least six letters since they have two or more rafsi, each at least three letters long; hence they cannot be confused with gismu.
When attaching two rafsi together, it may be necessary to insert a hyphen letter. In Lojban, the term “hyphen” always refers to a letter, either the vowel y or one of the consonants r and n. (The letter l can also be a hyphen, but is not used as one in lujvo.) ”

“ A speaker who uses tanru (and pragmatically all speakers must) takes the risk of being misunderstood. Using tanru is convenient because they are short and expressive; the circumlocution required to squeeze out all ambiguity can require too much effort.
No general theory covering the meaning of all possible tanru exists; probably no such theory can exist. However, some regularities obviously do exist:
Example 5.14 Example 5.15 are parallel tanru, in the sense that the relationship between barda and prenu is the same as that between cmalu and prenu. ”

“ Some gismu may be superfluous, or appear for historical reasons: the gismu list was being collected for almost 35 years and was only weeded out once. Instead, the intention is that the gismu blanket semantic space: they make it possible to talk about the entire range of human concerns.
There are about 1350 gismu. In learning Lojban, you need only to learn most of these gismu and their combining forms (known as rafsi) as well as perhaps 200 major cmavo, and you will be able to communicate effectively in the language. ”

“ Made well-known by that article and by occasional references in science fiction (most notably in Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress) and computer publications, Loglan and Lojban have been built over four decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters, led since 1987 by The Logical Language Group (who are the publishers of this book) .
There are thousands of artificial languages (of which Esperanto is the best-known) , but Loglan/Lojban has been engineered to make it unique in several ways. ”

“ Stress falls on the next to the last syllable of all words, unless that vowel is y, which is never stressed; in such words the third-to-last syllable is stressed. If a word only has one syllable, then that syllable is not stressed. ”

“ Each selbri (relation) has a specific rule that defines the role of each sumti in the bridi, based on its position. In the table above, that order was expressed by labeling the sumti positions as x1, x2, x3, x4, and x5.
Like the table in Section 2.3 (p. 17) , this table is far from complete: in fact, no complete table can exist, because Lojban allows new words to be created (in specified ways) whenever a speaker or writer finds the existing supply of words inadequate. This notion is a basic difference between Lojban (and some other languages such as German and Chinese) and English ”

“ Example 5.17 That's a little school for girls. Example 5.18 That's a school for little girls. This ambiguity is quite different from the simple tanru ambiguity described in Section 5.2 (p. 80) . We understand that “girls' school” means “a school where girls are the students”, and not “a school where girls are the teachers” or “a school which is a girl” (!) . Likewise, we understand that “little girl” means “girl who is small”. This is an ambiguity of grouping. Is “girls' school” to be taken as a unit, with “little” specifying the type of girls' school? ”

“ Example 2.6 The book gives John Sam. seems strange to us merely because the places are being filled by unorthodox arguments. The relationship expressed by “give” has not changed.
In Lojban, each selbri has a specified number and type of arguments, known collectively as its “place structure”. The simplest kind of selbri consists of a single root word, called a gismu, and the definition in a dictionary gives the place structure explicitly. The primary task of constructing a Lojban sentence, after choosing the relationship itself, is deciding what you will use to fill in the sumti places. ”

“ A rafsi is then usually attached to the beginning of the Lojbanized form, using a hyphen to ensure that the resulting word doesn't fall apart.
The rafsi categorizes or limits the meaning of the fu'ivla; otherwise a word having several different jargon meanings in other languages would require the word-inventor to choose which meaning should be assigned to the fu'ivla, since fu'ivla (like other brivla) are not permitted to have more than one definition. Such a Stage 3 borrowing is the most common kind of fu'ivla. ”

“ As it happens, spageti and kuarka are valid Stage 4 fu'ivla, but xaceru looks like a compound cmavo, and kobra like a gismu.
For another example, “integral” has a specific meaning to a mathematician. But the Lojban fu'ivla integrale, which is a valid Stage 4 fu'ivla, does not convey that mathematical sense to a nonmathematical listener, even one with an English-speaking background; its source – the English word “integral” – has various other specialized meanings in other fields. ”

“ Examples usually occupy three lines. The first of these is in Lojban (in italics) , the second in a word-by-word literal translation of the Lojban into English (in boldface) , and the third in colloquial English. The second and third lines are sometimes called the “literal translation” and the “colloquial translation” respectively. Sometimes, when clarity is not sacrificed thereby, one or both are omitted. If there is more than one Lojban sentence, it generally means that they have the same meaning.
Words are sometimes surrounded by square brackets. ”

“ A quoted string should be able to contain other quoted strings - this is only a problem for a LOhU quote itself, since the LEhU clossing this quote would otherwise close the outer quotes, which is incorrect. For this purpose, we will cheat on the use of ZO in such a quote (since this is ungrammatical text, it is a sign ignored by the parser) . Use ZO to mark any nested quotation LOhU. The preparser then will absorb it by the ZO rule, before testing for LOhU. This is obviously not the standard usage for ZO, which would otherwise cause the result to be a sumti. ”