Lojban

“ 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. ”

“ In Lojban we make no such grammatical distinctions; these three sentences, when expressed in Lojban, are structurally identical. 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. ”

“ Unlike the tanru, though, the emotional expressions are built on some fairly nebulous root emotions — words that cannot be defined with the precision of the gismu. The emotion words of Lojban will very quickly take on a life of their own, and the outline given here will evolve into a true system of emotions.
There are several theories as to the nature of emotion, and they change from year to year as we learn more about ourselves. Whether or not Lojban’s additive/scalar emotional model is an accurate model for human emotions, it does support the linguistic needs for expressing those emotions. ”

“ There are two ways to hesitate in Lojban: to pause between words (that is, to say nothing) or to use the cmavo “.y.” (of selma'o Y) . This resembles in sound the English hesitation noise written “uh” (or “er”) , but differs from it in the requirement for pauses before and after. Unlike a long pause, it cannot be mistaken for having nothing more to say: it holds the floor for the speaker. Since vowel length is not significant in Lojban, the “y” sound can be dragged out for as long as necessary. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But what exactly does “na'e” negate? Does the negation include only the gismu “klama”, which is the entire selbri in this case, or does it include the “le zarci” as well? In Lojban, the answer is unambiguously “only the gismu”. The cmavo “na'e” always applies only to what follows it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All that is essential is that the place structure of “zdani” continues to apply.
For something (call it z1) to qualify as a “gerku zdani” in Lojban, it’s got to be a house, first of all. For it to be a house, it’s got to house someone (call that z2) . Furthermore, there’s got to be a dog somewhere (called g1) . For g1 to count as a dog in Lojban, it’s got to belong to some breed as well (called g2) . And finally, for z1 to be in the first place of “gerku zdani”, as opposed to just “zdani”, there’s got to be some relationship (called r) between some place of “zdani” and some place of “gerku”. ”

“ But topic-comment sentences like Example 4.9 are inherently vague, and this difference between “ponse” (which expects a physical object in x2) and “djica” is ignored. See Example 9.3 for another topic/comment sentence.
The subject of an English sentence is often the topic as well, but in Lojban the sumti in the x1 place is not necessarily the topic, especially if it is the normal (unconverted) x1 for the selbri. Thus Lojban sentences don’t necessarily have a “subject” in the English sense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is all the difference in the world between:
1.2) John picked up a stick and shook it. and
1.3) John picked up a stick and shook a stick. Example 1.3 does not imply that the two sticks are necessarily the same, whereas Example 1.2 requires that they are.
In Lojban, we have sumti rather than nouns, so our equivalent of pronouns are called by the hybrid term “pro-sumti”. A purely Lojban term would be “sumti cmavo”: all of the pro-sumti are cmavo belonging to selma'o KOhA. In exactly the same way, Lojban has a group of cmavo (belonging to selma'o GOhA) which serve as selbri or full bridi. ”

“ Left of a place above me, the man bites the dog. (Perhaps the speaker is at the bottom of a manhole, and the dog-biting is going on at the edge of the street.)
In the English translation, the keywords “left” and “above” occur in reverse order to the Lojban order. This effect is typical of what happens when we “unfold” Lojban compound tenses into their English equivalents, and shows why it is not very useful to try to memorize a list of Lojban tense constructs and their colloquial English equivalents. ”

“ The lerfu words for English are a motley crew: the relationship between “doubleyou” and “w” is strictly historical in nature; “aitch” represents “h” but has no clear relationship to it at all; and “z” has two distinct lerfu words, “zee” and “zed”, depending on the dialect of English in question.
All of Lojban’s basic lerfu words are made by one of three rules:
to get a lerfu word for a vowel, add “bu”; to get a lerfu word for a consonant, add “y”; the lerfu word for “'” is “.y'y”. Therefore, the following table represents the basic Lojban alphabet:
' a b c d e .y'y. .abu by. cy. dy. ”

“ Secondary stress can be used for contrast, or for emphasis of a point. Secondary stress can be emphasized at any level up to primary stress, although the speaker must not allow a false primary stress in brivla, since errors in word resolution could result.
The following are Lojban words with stress explicitly shown:
9.6) dikyjvo DI,ky,jvo (In a fully-buffered dialect, the pronunciation would be: ['di kə ʒɪ vo] .) Note that the syllable “ky” is not counted in determining stress. The vowel “y” is never stressed in a normal Lojban context. ”

“ In Lojban, the converted selbri has a new place structure that is renumbered to reflect the place reversal, thus having effects when such a conversion is used in combination with other constructs such as “le selbri [ku] ”
The basic structure of longer utterances People don’t always say just one sentence. Lojban has a specific structure for talk or writing that is longer than one sentence. The entirety of a given speech event or written text is called an utterance. The sentences (usually, but not always, bridi) in an utterance are separated by the cmavo “ni'o” and “.i”. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This form of translation does not mean that Lojban is a language of CB enthusiasts, but rather that in most natural languages these forms are so well handled by the context that only in specific domains (like speaking on the radio) do they need special words. In Lojban, dependence on the context can be dangerous, as speaker and listener may not share the right context, and so the vocatives provide a formal protocol for use when it is appropriate. ”

“ Therefore, the “se'e” convention is only intelligible to those who know the underlying character set. For precisely specifying a particular character, however, it has the advantages of unambiguity and (relative) cultural neutrality, and therefore Lojban provides a means for those with access to descriptions of such character sets to take advantage of them. ”

“ In Lojban, these are considered two consonant sounds spoken together without an intervening vowel sound, and so are represented in Lojban by the two separate consonants: “tc” (IPA [tʃ] ) and “dj” (IPA [dʒ] ) . In general, whether a complex sound is considered one sound or two depends on the language: Russian views “ts” as a single sound, whereas English, French, and Lojban consider it to be a consonant cluster.
The Special Lojban Characters The apostrophe, period, and comma need special attention. ”

“ Step 1 - Lexing From phonemes, stress, and pause, it is possible to resolve Lojban unambiguously into a stream of words. Any machine processing of speech will have to have some way to deal with ’non-Lojban’ failures of fluent speech, of course. The resolved words can be expressed as a text file using Lojban’s phonetic spelling rules. The following steps assume that there is the possibility of non-Lojban text within the Lojban text (delimited appropriately) . Such non-Lojban text may not be reducible from speech phonetically. ”

“ The three subtypes of brivla are:
gismu, the Lojban primitive roots from which all other brivla are built; lujvo, the compounds of two or more gismu; and fu'ivla (literally “copy-word”) , the specialized words that are not Lojban primitives or natural compounds, and are therefore borrowed from other languages. 4.4 gismu4.4 gismu The gismu, or Lojban root words, are those brivla representing concepts most basic to the language. The gismu were chosen for various reasons: some represent concepts that are very familiar and basic; some represent concepts that are frequently used in other languages ”

“ But Example 12.14 means that you see one thing which is both a man and a woman simultaneously! A “nanmu je ninmu” is a manwoman, a presumably non-existent creature who is both a “nanmu” and a “ninmu”.
Truth questions and connective questions So far we have addressed only sentences which are statements. Lojban, like all human languages, needs also to deal with sentences which are questions. There are many ways of asking questions in Lojban, but some of these (like questions about quantity, tense, and emotion) are discussed in other chapters. ”

“ The cmavo “zoi” (of selma'o ZOI) is a quotation mark for quoting non-Lojban text. Its syntax is “zoi X. text .X”, where X is a Lojban word (called the delimiting word) which is separated from the quoted text by pauses, and which is not found in the written text or spoken phoneme stream. It is common, but not required, to use the lerfu word (of selma'o BY) which corresponds to the Lojban name of the language being quoted:
10.2) zoi gy. John is a man .gy. cu glico jufra “John is a man” is an English sentence. where “gy” stands for “glico”. ”

“ Lojban gismu are defined as broadly as possible, allowing tanru and lujvo to narrow down the definition. There probably are no necessary and sufficient conditions for defining what is and what is not a bear that can be pinned down with complete precision: the real world is fuzzy. In borderline cases, “le” may communicate better than “lo”.)
So while Example 2.6 could easily be true (there is a real writer named “Greg Bear”) , and Example 2.8 could be true if the speaker is sufficiently peculiar in what he or she describes as a bear, Example 2.9 is certainly false. ”

“ Section 19 contains a table of proposed lerfu words for some common accent marks.
Punctuation marks Lojban does not have punctuation marks as such: the denpa bu and the slaka bu are really a part of the alphabet. Other languages, however, use punctuation marks extensively. As yet, Lojban does not have any words for these punctuation marks, but a mechanism exists for devising them: the cmavo “lau” of selma'o LAU. “lau” must always be followed by a BY word; the interpretation of the BY word is changed from a lerfu to a punctuation mark. ”

“ I try to go to the market from the house. Example 8.4 is a less deeply nested construction, requiring fewer cmavo. As a result it is probably easier to understand.
Note that in Lojban “trying to go” is expressed using “troci” as the tertau. The reason is that “trying to go” is a “going type of trying”, not a “trying type of going”. The trying is more fundamental than the going — if the trying fails, we may not have a going at all.
Any sumti which precede a selbri with an inverted tanru fill the places of the selbri (i.e., the places of the tertau) in the ordinary way. ”