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What Is Lojban?/Part I
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| Organization of this booklet | What Is Lojban? ~ Part I. Introduction written by (edited by) Nick Nicholas & John Cowan | Introduction (continued) |
I. Introduction
lidne pagbu
Chapter 1. Questions and Answers on Lojban
preti ce'o danfu sera'a la lojban.
1. What is Lojban?
Lojban (/LOZH-bahn/) is a constructed language. Originally called 'Loglan' by project founder Dr. James Cooke Brown, who started the language development in 1955, the goals for the language were first described in the article Loglan in Scientific American, June 1960. Made well-known by that article and by occasional references in science fiction and computer publications, Loglan/Lojban has been built over four decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters, led since 1987 by The Logical Language Group.
There are many artificial languages, but Loglan/Lojban has been engineered to make it unique in several ways. The following are the main features of Lojban:
- Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
- Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
- Lojban grammar is based on the principles of logic.
- Lojban has an unambiguous grammar.
- Lojban has phonetic spelling, and sounds can be divided into words in only one way.
- Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
- Lojban's 1350 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
- Lojban is regular; the rules of the language don't have exceptions.
- Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
- Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from creative to scientific, from theoretical to practical.
The following sections examine each of these points, while answering the questions most often asked about Lojban.
2. Why was Lojban developed?
Lojban was originally designed to support research on a concept known as the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis. Simply expressed, this hypothesis states that the structure of a language constrains the thinking of people using that language. Lojban allows the full expressive capability of a natural language, but differs in structure from other languages in major ways. This allows it to be used as a test vehicle for scientists studying the relationships between language, thought, and culture. If you are reading this as part of the introductory booklet, further discussion of these issues can be found in the section Technical Descriptions.
3. Are there other uses for Lojban?
Yes, several. Due to its unambiguous grammar and simple structure, it also can be easily parsed (broken down for analysis) by computers, making it possible for Lojban to be used in the future for computer-human interaction, and perhaps conversation. Lojban's structure is similar to existing artificial intelligence (AI) programming languages, and it may become be a most powerful adjunct to AI research, especially in the storing and processing of data about the world and people's conceptions of it. There are also linguists interested in Lojban's potential as an intermediate language in computer-aided translation of natural languages; and Lojban is of interest as a potential stepping-stone for students learning other languages. Because Lojban was designed to be culturally neutral, and has a powerful vocabulary easily learned by people of different language origins, some are interested in Lojban's potential as an international language. These are only the beginnings of the Lojban applications that will be developed in the future.
4. Is Lojban a computer language?
Lojban was designed as a human language, and not as a computer language. It is therefore intended for use in conversation, reading, writing, and thinking. However, since Lojban can be processed by a computer much more easily than can a natural language, it is only a matter of time before Lojban-based computer applications are developed. Learning and using Lojban doesn't require you to know anything about computers or to talk like one.
5. How is Lojban written? How does it sound?
Lojban uses letters of the Roman alphabet to represent its 6 vowels and 17 consonants. The Lojban character set uses only standard typewriter/computer keyboard keys; capitalization is used rarely, and only to indicate unusual stress in the pronunciation of names. Punctuation is spoken as words. The written language corresponds exactly to the sounds of the spoken language; spelling is phonetic and unambiguous, and the flowing sounds of the language break down into words in only one possible way. These features make computer speech recognition and transcription more practical. Learning to pronounce and spell Lojban is trivial.
Lojban has a smooth, rhythmic sound, somewhat like Italian. However, its consonants create a fullness and power found in Slavic languages like Russian, and the large number of vowel pairs impart a hint of Chinese, Polynesian, and other Oriental languages, though without the tones that make many of those languages difficult for others to learn.
Because there are no idioms to shorten expressions, a Lojban text can be longer than the corresponding colloquial English text. The unambiguous linguistic structures that result are a major benefit that makes this worthwhile; and Lojban has constructions of its own that are rather more succinct than their equivalents in English (such as logic-specific formulations, and expressions of attitude.) Moreover, much of the disambiguating machinery of Lojban is optional; you use them only when you need to use them.
As an example of Lojban, Occam's Razor ("The simplest explanation is usually the best") may be translated as:
roda poi velcki cu so'eroi ke ganai saprai gi xagrai
/row-dah poy VELSH-kee shoo so-heh-roy keh GAH-nye SAHP-rye ghee KHAH-grye/
All somethings which-are explanations mostly-are (if superlatively-simple then superlatively-good).
The apostrophe is pronounced like a short, breathy 'h', and is used to clearly separate the two adjacent vowels for a listener, without requiring a pause between them.
(If you are reading this text in the What is Lojban? booklet, a full pronunciation key is available in the Overview of Lojban Grammar.)
6. What kind of grammar does Lojban have?
'Grammar' is a word with painful memories for many of us. But though Lojban grammar seems strange at first sight, it is actually quite simple. It is based on a system called predicate logic, which states that in any sentence you have a relationship (selbri in Lojban) between one or more arguments (sumti). An argument can be a thing, event, quality or just about anything. To give an example, the English sentence
Chris adores Pat
has a relation adore, between two arguments, Chris and Pat. In Lojban this would be
la kris. prami la pat.
or, if you prefer,
la kris. la pat. prami
(The full stops mean that you have to pause slightly to separate the words – anythingelseinLojbancanberuntogetherwithoutbeingmisunderstood).
You might be thinking "Well in that case a relationship is a verb and an argument is a noun, so why bother with special terminology like selbri and whatnot?" However, in Lojban Chris's feelings about Pat might be described like this:
la pat. melbi
Pat is beautiful.
In English you have a verb ('doing word'), is, and an adjective ('describing word'), beautiful. In Turkish, you would say Pat güzel, which is a noun and an adjective, with no verb required. In Chinese you would use meili, a 'stative verb' – but enough! In Lojban you don't need all these language-specific notions.
Now, if there are no nouns, verbs, subjects or objects in Lojban, how do we know that la kris. la pat. prami means that Chris adores Pat and not the other way? Different languages handle this problem differently. In English it is done with word order, and when that isn't enough, with prepositions (words like at, from, to, with and so on). In other languages, like Latin or Turkish, it's done by changing the form of the words, e.g. Pat'i Chris sever in Turkish means "Chris loves Pat", not "Pat loves Chris."
In Lojban, the order in which arguments appear is built in to the meaning of the word. For example, the word dunda means give, but its full meaning is:
x1 gives x2 to x3
So mi pu dunda le cukta le ninmu means "I gave the book to the woman", not "I gave the woman to the book").
The important point is that Lojban has a lot of what we would call 'grammar', but nearly all of this is contained in the cmavo (structure words), and you can use as many or as few of them as you want.
7. What else is distinctive about Lojban grammar?
In Lojban, it is equally easy to speak of something as being an action as it is to speak of it as being a state of existence. The distinction between the two can be ignored, or can be explicitly expressed in a variety of ways:
- by associating concepts in tanru metaphors (combinations of selbri into single expressions giving novel meanings), involving words like gasnu ('do'), zasti ('exist'), zukte ('act with purpose');
- with a variety of 'operators' (cmavo) dealing with abstractions such as events, states, properties, amounts, ideas, experience, and truth;
- or with four pre-defined varieties of causality (others can be developed through tanru metaphor).
A major benefit of using a predicate grammar is that Lojban doesn't have inflections and declensions on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Most natural languages have evolved such variations to reduce ambiguity as to how words are related in a sentence. Language change has made these inflections and declensions highly irregular and thus difficult to learn. Lojban uses the simple but flexible predicate relationship to erase both the irregularity and the declensions.
Tense and location markers (inflections), adverbs, and prepositions are combined into one part of speech. New preposition-like forms can be built at will from predicates; these allow the user to expand upon a sentence by attaching and relating arguments not normally included in the meaning of a word.
Numbers and quantifiers are conceptually expanded from natural languages. Many, enough, too much, a few, and at least are among concepts that are expressed as numbers in Lojban. Thus "it costs $3.95" and "it costs too much" are grammatically identical, and one can talk of being "enough-th in line" for tickets to a sellout movie. Core concepts of logic, mathematics, and science are built into the root vocabulary. They enhance discussion of those topics, and are surprisingly useful in ordinary speech, too.
Predicate logic can express a wide variety of human thought; Lojban also has non-logical constructs that do not affect or obscure the logical structure, allowing communications that are not amenable to logical analysis. For example, Lojban has a full set of emotional indicators, which are similar to such interjections in English as Oh!, Aha!, and Wheee!, but each has a specific meaning. Similarly, Lojban has indicators of the speaker's relationship to what is said (whether it is hearsay, direct observation, logical deduction, etc.) similar to those found in some Native American languages.
Lojban supports metalinguistic discussion about the sentences being spoken while remaining unambiguous. Lojban also supports a variety of 'tense' logic that allows one to be extremely specific about time and space (and space-time) relationships. A substantial portion of Lojban's grammar is designed to support unambiguous statement of mathematical expressions and relations in a manner compatible both with international usage and the rest of Lojban's grammar.
Lojban 'parts of speech' are convertible from one to another by using short structure words (called cmavo). One can make numbers serve as nouns or verbs, or invent new numbers and prepositions. Lojban removes many of the constraints on human thought, while preserving tight control on structural syntax.
8. Lojban seems complex. How hard is it to learn?
Lojban is actually much simpler than natural languages. It is only slightly more complex in its grammar than the current generation of computer languages (such as C++ and Perl). Lojban seems complex only because the varieties of human thought are complex, and Lojban is designed to minimize constraints on those thoughts. Lojban text can appear longer and more complex due to its lack of idiom, its complete explicitness of logical structure, and most importantly, its unfamiliarity. On the other hand, conversational speech uses less than half of the possible grammatical structures, leaving the rest for writing and for other circumstances when one is likely to take time to carefully formulate exact logical phrasings.
Lojban's pronunciation, spelling, word formation, and grammar rules are fixed, and the language is free of exceptions to these rules. Such exceptions are the bane of learning to speak a natural language correctly. Without the burden of ambiguity, Lojban users can be precise and specific more easily than in other languages.
Because Lojban's grammar is simple, it is easier to learn than other languages. Using flashcard-like techniques, a working vocabulary including the complete set of 1350 root words can take 8-12 weeks of study at 1 hour per day. It is by no means uncommon for people who embark on learning Lojban to be able to write grammatical Lojban within a few days, and to hold at least a limited conversation within a few weeks. Natural languages, especially English, take several years to learn to a comparable level of skill.
The available Lojban teaching materials are so structured that you can learn the language without classroom instruction or a close community of speakers. Communication practice with others is needed to achieve fluency, but you can start using the language as you achieve proficiency.
9. What do you mean by 'unambiguous'?
Lojban has an unambiguous grammar (proven by computer analysis of a formal grammar), pronunciation, and morphology (word forms). In practice this means that the person who reads or hears a Lojban sentence is never in doubt as to what words it contains or what roles they play in the sentence. This is true even if the words are unfamiliar, so long as the spelling and grammar rules are known. Lojban has no words that sound alike but have different meanings (like herd and heard), that have multiple unrelated meanings (set), or that differ only in punctuation but not in sound (like the abominable its and it's). There is never any doubt about where words begin and end (if you hear cargo ship, do you hear two words or three?) Most important, the function of each word is inescapably clear; there is nothing like the English sentence Time flies like an arrow, in which any of the first three words could be the verb.
Lojban is not entirely unambiguous, of course; human beings occasionally desire to be ambiguous in their expressions. In Lojban, this ambiguity is limited to semantics, tanru metaphor, and intentional omission of information (ellipsis).
Semantic ambiguity results because words in natural languages represent families of concepts rather than individual meanings. These meanings often have only weak semantic relationships to each other (the English word run is a good example.) In addition, each individual's personal experiences provide emotional connotations to words. By providing a fresh, culturally-neutral start, Lojban attempts to minimize the transference of these associations as people learn the language. Most Lojban words do not much resemble corresponding words in other languages; the differences aid in making this fresh start possible.
Lojban's powerful tanru (combinations of selbri into novel concepts) and word-building features make it easy to make fine distinctions between concepts. This discourages the tendency for individual words to acquire families of meanings. Lojban's tanru metaphors are themselves ambiguous; they specify a relationship between concepts, but not what the relationship is. That relationship can be made explicit using unambiguous logical constructs if necessary, or can be left vague, as the speaker typically desires. Similarly, portions of the logical structure of a Lojban expression can be omitted, greatly simplifying the expression while causing some ambiguity. Unlike in the natural languages, though, this ambiguity is readily identified by a reader or listener. Thus all ambiguity in Lojban is constrained and recognizable, and can be clarified as necessary by further interaction.
This precision in no way confines the meaning of a Lojban sentence. It is possible to be fanciful or ridiculous, to tell lies, or to be misunderstood. You can be very specific, or you can be intentionally vague. Your hearer may not understand what you meant, but will always understand what you said.
10. Can you make jokes in an unambiguous language?
Most humor arises from situation and character and is as funny in Lojban as in any language. Humor based on word play, of course, is language-dependent. Lojban has no homonyms, and hence no simple puns; puns derived from similar sounds are still possible, and have in fact been attempted (for example in the Lojban translation of Alice in Wonderland). Since Lojban will almost always be a second language, bilingual puns and word play abound, often based on the relative ambiguity of the other languages involved. Humor based on internal grammatical ambiguity is of course impossible in Lojban, but humor based on nonsensical statements, or on logical structures that would be difficult to clearly express in another language, becomes easier.
As speakers become fluent, and conventional phrases come into use, Lojban will develop its own forms of spoonerisms and subtle puns. Unique forms of Lojban word-play have already turned up; they exploit the way small variations in Lojban grammar create unexpected variations in meaning, and the capability to simply express rather mind-boggling relationships. Like all word-play, these lose zest when translated into other languages.
Related to humor is the aphorism: the pithy saying that gains pungency or poignancy from terse, elegant phrasing. Lojban seems as capable of aphorisms as any language, perhaps more than most; however, because the language is so young, few such aphorisms have been devised to date.
11. Isn't Esperanto the 'international language'?
There have been hundreds of artificial international languages developed, of which Esperanto is the most successful and widely known. Esperanto, like most other such languages, was based on European languages in both grammar and vocabulary. Although it manages to be relatively neutral between them, it still retains an inherent cultural bias which makes it unsuited for most of the purposes that Lojban was designed for.
Lojban is culturally fully neutral. Its vocabulary was built algorithmically using today's six most widely spoken languages: Chinese, Hindi, English, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic. Lojban's words thus show roots in three major families of languages spoken by most of the world's people. Lojban's grammar accommodates structures found in non-European languages, and uses sounds found in many of the world's languages. Coupled with the potential computer applications that will make Lojban a useful language to know, Lojban's potential as an international language may be more far-reaching than Esperanto's.
Lojban was not designed primarily to be an international language, however, but rather as a linguistic tool for studying and understanding language. Its linguistic and computer applications make Lojban unique among proposed international languages: Lojban can be successful without immediately being accepted and adopted everywhere, and Lojban can be useful and interesting even to those skeptical of or hostile towards the international language movement.
Since Lojban is also not in direct competition with Esperanto, it has proven attractive to Esperantists interested in acquiring a new perspective on their own international language, and who feel less threatened because Lojban has different goals. Lojban's supporters recognize that it will take decades for Lojban to acquire both the number and variety of speakers and the extensive history of usage that marks Esperanto culture. Meanwhile, each language community has much to learn from the other; this process is already well underway.
