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Part I

What Is Lojban? ~ Part II. Technical Descriptions written by (edited by) Nick Nicholas & John Cowan

3. Diagrammed Summary of Lojban Grammar

II. Technical Descriptions

certu velskicu

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Contents 2. Overview of Lojban Grammar 3. Diagrammed Summary of Lojban Grammar 4. Linguistic Issues pertaining to Lojban

Chapter 2. Overview of Lojban Grammar

naltcila velski be le lojbo gerna sidbo

This overview of Lojban will hopefully give you a good feel for the design and scope of the language. It serves as an introduction to learning the language; most of the special terminology used elsewhere is defined here. This overview is not complete, nor detailed; much is glossed over. To actually learn the language you must study the available reference or teaching materials.

The material following is divided up into the major facets of language description. These are:

Orthography

the way the language is written

Phonology

the way the language sounds

Morphology

the structure of words

Semantics

the meanings of words, sentences, and expressions

Grammar

the ways in which words may be put together

For many special terms, we will give a definition, and then the Lojban word for the concept. The Lojban words are then used, to avoid confusion due to the various meanings of the English jargon words. The Lojban words are also what is used in other publications about the language.

Orthography

Lojban uses the Roman alphabet, consisting of the following letters and symbols:

omitting the letters h, q, and w. The three special characters are not punctuation:

• The apostrophe represents a specific sound, similar to the English /h/.
• The period is an optional reminder to the reader, representing a mandatory pause dictated by the rules of the language. Such pauses can be of any duration, and are part of the morphology, or word formation rules, and not the grammar.
• The comma is used to indicate a syllable break within a word, generally one that is not obvious to the reader.

The alphabet order given above is that of the ASCII symbol set, most widely used in computers for sorting and searching.

Lojban does not require capitalization of any word type, including proper names, and such capitalization is discouraged. Capital letters are used instead to indicate non-standard stress in pronunciation of Lojbanized names. Thus the English name Josephine, as normally pronounced, is Lojbanized as DJOsefin, pronounced /JO,seh,feen/. Without the capitalization, Lojban stress rules would force the /seh/ syllable to be stressed.

Lojban's alphabet and pronunciation rules bring about what is called audio-visual isomorphism. There is not only a unique symbol to represent each sound of Lojban, but also a single correct way to separate the sounds of continuous Lojban speech into words. Similarly, a Lojban text may be read off sound by sound, using pronunciation and stress rules, to form an unambiguous uttered expression. Spelling in Lojban is thus trivial to learn.

Phonology

Each Lojban sound is uniquely assigned to a single letter, or combination of letters. Each letter is defined to have a particular set of possible pronunciations, such that there is no overlap between letter sounds.

Most of the consonants are pronounced exactly as they are most commonly pronounced in English. The following gives English and Lojban examples for these.

Note: In the following examples, the English word and the Lojban word are the same where possible. (This was not possible for j.)</blockquote> Unvoiced. p /p/ powder purmo /POOR,mo/ f /f/ fall farlu /FAHR,loo/ t /t/ time temci /TEM,shee/ s /s/ soldier sonci /SONE,shee/ k /k/ keen kinli /KEEN,lee/ Voiced. b /b/ bottle botpi /BOAT,pee/ v /v/ voice voksa /VOAK,sah/ d /d/ dance dansu /DAHN,soo/ z /z/ zinc zinki /ZEEN,kee/ g /g/ goose gunse /GOON,seh/ Incidentally, for these examples, the Lojban example is a close equivalent of the English example used, showing that some words in Lojban are very similar to their English counterparts. In the pronunciation guides, note the conventions of capitalizing stressed syllables and of separating syllables with commas. These conventions could optionally be used in the Lojban words themselves, but are not necessary. In the above examples, the consonants in the first table are called unvoiced consonants, because they are spoken without voicing them using the vocal folds. The consonants in the second table are their voiced equivalents. When a consonant is made by touching the tongue so as to block air passage, it is called a stop (p, b, t, d, k, g). If the blockage is incomplete, and air rubs between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, it is called a fricative (f, v, s, z). For example, k is an unvoiced stop in the back of the mouth. Its unvoiced fricative equivalent is x, which is rarely found in English (the Scottish loch, as in Loch Ness monster, is an example). x /kh/ loch lalxu /LAHL,khoo/ -- xriso /KHREE,so/ Two other fricatives are c and j. c is the unvoiced /sh/ sound that is usually represented by two letters in English. j is its voiced equivalent, rarely occurring alone in English (but see below). c /sh/ shirt creka /SHREH,kah/ English glico /GLEE,sho/ j /zh/ measure lojban /LOZH,bahn/ azure These two fricatives occur frequently in English combined with a stop (giving affricates). Lojban phonology recognizes this, and the /ch/ sound is written tc, while the /j/ sound is written dj. tc /tsh/ much mutce /MU,cheh/ =/ch/ dj /dzh/ jaw xedja /KHED,jah/ =/j/ The other four Lojban consonants are also pronounced as in English. But each has two possible pronunciations. The normal Lojban pronunciation is shown in the first table. In names, borrowings, and a few other situations, however, these consonants can occur in a syllable of their own, with no vowel. In this case they are called syllabic consonants, and are pronounced as in the second table. Non-syllabic. l /l/ late lerci /LEHR,shee/ m /m/ move muvdu /MOVE,du/ n /n/ nose nazbi /NAHZ,bee/ r /r/ rock rokci /ROKE,shee/ Syllabic. l /l/ bottle Carl kar,l /KAHR,l/ m /m/ bottom Miriam miri,m /MEE,ree,m/ n /n/ button Ellen el,n /EHL,n/ r /r/ letter Burt brt /brt/

Note: The names given above have syllabic consonants in American English. In British English, Burt is pronounced instead as byt, Carl as kal, Ellen usually as .elyn or .elen, and Miriam as miri,ym.

Consonants may be found in pairs, or even in triples, in many Lojban words; even longer clusters of consonants, often including at least one syllabic consonant, may be found in Lojbanized names or borrowings. Some of these clusters may appear strange to the English speaker (for example mlatu /MLAH,tu/), but all permitted clusters were chosen so as to be quite pronounceable by most speakers and understandable to most listeners. If you run across a cluster that you simply cannot pronounce because of its unfamiliarity, it is permissible to insert a very short non-Lojban vowel sound between them. The English /i/ as in bit is recommended for English speakers.

The basic Lojban vowels are best described as being similar to the vowels of Spanish and Italian. These languages use pure vowels, whereas English commonly uses vowels that are complexes of two or more pure vowels called diphthongs (2-sounds) or triphthongs (3-sounds). English speakers must work at keeping the sounds pure; a crisp, clipped speech tends to help, along with keeping the lips and tongue tensed (for example by smiling tightly) while speaking.

There are five common vowels (a, e, i, o, u), and one special-purpose vowel (y). English words that are close in pronunciation are given, but few speakers pronounce these words in English with the purity and tension needed in Lojban pronunciation.

a /ah/ father, (American) top patfu /PAHT,foo/ e /eh/ bet, lens lenjo /LENN,zho/ i /ee/ green, machine minji /MEEN,zhee/ o /o/ joke, note notci /NO,chee/ u /u/ boot, shoe cutci /SHOE,chee/ y /uh/ sofa, above lobypli /LOBE,uh,plee/

The sound represented by y, called 'schwa', is a totally relaxed sound, contrasting with all the other tensed vowels. In this way, the Lojban vowels are maximally separated among possible vowel sounds. The English speaker must be especially careful to ensure that a final unstressed vowel a in a Lojban word is kept tensed, and not relaxed as in the English sofa (compare the equivalent Lojban sfofa /SFO,fah/, not sfofy /SFO,fuh/).

Lojban has diphthongs as well, but these are always represented by the two vowels that combine to form them:

Rising diphthongs.

ai /ai/ high bai bye au /au/ cow vau vow ei /ei/ bay pei pay oi /oi/ boy coi shoy

Falling diphthongs.

ia /yah/ yard ie /yeh/ yell ii /yee/ hear ye io /yo/ Yolanda iu /yu/ beauty ua /wah/ wander ue /weh/ well ui /wee/ week uo /wo/ woe uu /wu/ woo

The diphthongs in the second table are found in Lojban only when used as words by themselves, and in Lojbanized names. Those in the first table may be found anywhere.

Any other time these vowel pairs occur together in a single word, they must be kept separate in order to unambiguously distinguish the separate vowels from the diphthongs. The principle has been extended to all Lojban vowels for consistency, and all non-diphthong vowel pairs in a word are separated in print and in sound by an apostrophe ('), representing a short, breathy /h/ sound. (Say Oh hello quickly and without a pause between the words to get an English equivalent, in this case of Lojban o'e. Any voiceless non-Lojban sound may also be used.)

When the vowels occur together, one at the end of a word and the other at the beginning of the next word, the ' is not used to separate them. (Were it used, it would join them into a single word). Instead, a pause is mandatory between the two vowels. The pause may be extremely short (called a glottal stop) as in the English he eats, or may be longer. The pause is mandatory and thus may be inferred without writing it, but it is usually signalled to a reader with a period (.) before the word starting with a vowel.

A pause is also required after any Lojban name, which always ends in a consonant. (A "." is written after the name to mark this, thus distinguishing names from other words without using capitalization.) Every vowel-initial Lojban word is thus preceded by a pause, and such words are usually spelled with a "." at the beginning. There are a small number of other places where pauses are required to separate words. "." may be used to mark the separation in these cases as well.

Lojban words of more than one syllable are stressed on the next-to-last, or penultimate, syllable. (The apostrophe counts as a syllable break: blari'o is stressed as blaRI'o.) Syllables for which the vowel is y are not counted in determining penultimate stress, nor are syllables counted in which the letters l, m, n, or r occur in their syllabic forms, with no other vowel in the same syllable. (Thus, lobypli = LO,by,pli, .uacintn. = .UA,cin,tn., kat,rin. = KAT,r,in.) In Lojbanized names, a speaker may retain a semblance of native pronunciation of the name by stressing a non-penultimate syllable. In this case, capitalization is used to mark the abnormal stress, as in DJOsefin. 'Josephine' in the example above.

It is not mandatory to mark stress and pause in writing in Lojban, except for word separation according to the rules above. There is no mandatory intonation, like the rising tone that always accompanies an English question. Lojban equivalents of English intonations are expressed as spoken (and written) words, and may be adequately communicated even in a monotone voice. Such intonation, and pauses for phrasing, are then totally at the speaker's discretion for ease in speaking or being understood, and carry no meaning of their own.

Morphology

The forms of Lojban words are extremely regular. This, coupled with the phonology rules, allows a stream of speech to be uniquely broken down into its component words.

Lojban uses three kinds of words:

cmene names brivla 'predicate' words cmavo 'structure' words

cmene

Names, or cmene, are very much like their counterparts in other languages. They are labels applied to things or people, to stand for them in descriptions or in direct address. They may convey meaning in themselves, describing concretely what they are refering to, but do not necessarily do so. Because names are often highly personal and individual, Lojban attempts to allow native language names to be used with a minimum of modification. However, most names must be Lojbanized to some extent, to prevent potential ambiguities. Examples of Lojbanized cmene include:

djim. Jim djein. Jane .arnold. Arnold pit. Pete katrinas. Katrina katr,in. Catherine katis. Cathy keit. Kate

cmene may have almost any form, but always end in a consonant, and are followed by a pause. cmene are penultimately stressed, unless unusual stress is marked with capitalization. A cmene may have multiple parts, each ending with a consonant and pause, or the parts may be combined into a single word with no pause. Thus djan. djonz. /jahn.jonz./ and djandjonz. /JAHNjonz./ are valid (American) Lojbanizations of John Jones, while .iunaited. steits. and either .iuNAItet,steits. or .iunaitet,STEITS. are valid Lojbanizations for United States, depending on how you wish to stress the name. In the last example, writing the cmene as a single word requires capitalization of the stressed syllables /NAI/ or /STEITS/, neither of which is penultimate in the single-word form of the cmene.

Note: Lojban words do not allow a voiced consonant (like d) to be next to an unvoiced consonant (like s), without an intervening pause. This is why the single-word version of United States goes into Lojban as .iunaitet,steits., whereas the two-word version remains as is: .iunaited.steits.

The final arbiter of the correct form of the cmene is the person doing the naming – although most cultures grant people the right to determine how they want their own name to be spelled and pronounced. The English Mary can thus be Lojbanized as meris., maris., meiris., or even marys. The latter is not pronounced much like its English equivalent, but may be desirable to someone who values spelling over pronunciation consistency. The final letter need not be an s; it must, however, be a Lojban consonant of some variety.

cmene are not permitted to have the words la, lai, or doi embedded in them, because they are always preceded by one of these words or by a pause. With one of these words embedded, the cmene might break up into valid Lojban words followed by a shorter, incorrect cmene. There are similar alternatives to these that can be used in Lojbanization, such as ly, lei, and do'i, that do not cause these problems.

brivla

'Predicate' words, or brivla, are the core of Lojban. The concept of 'predicate', or bridi, will be discussed in the grammar section below. brivla carry most of the semantic information in the language. They serve as the equivalent of English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, but are treated identically in Lojban grammar.

brivla may be recognized by several properties:

• they have more than one syllable
• they are penultimately stressed
• they have a consonant cluster (at least two adjacent consonants) within or between the first and second syllables
• they end in a vowel

The consonant cluster rule has the qualification that the letter y is totally ignored, even if it splits a consonant cluster. Thus lobypei /LOBE,uh,pay/ is a brivla<tt> even though the <tt>y separates the bp cluster.

brivla are divided into three subcategories according to how they are created:

gismu the 'primitive' roots of Lojban; e.g. klama lujvo compounds of gismu, or their abbreviations, with meanings defined from their components; e.g. lobypli fu'ivla 'borrowings' from other languages that have been Lojbanized (in a manner similar to how cmene are Lojbanized) in order to fit within the brivla requirements; e.g. cidjrspageti 'spaghetti' (it's not nearly as hard to say as it looks!)

brivla are defined so as to have only one meaning, which is expressed through a unique place structure. This concept is discussed further in the sections on semantics and grammar.

gismu

The gismu are the basic roots for the Lojban language. These roots were selected based on various criteria:

• occurrence or word frequency in other languages
• usefulness in building complex concepts
• and a few, like the words gismu, cmavo, and lujvo, are included as uniquely Lojbanic concepts that are basic to the language.

Each gismu is exactly five letters long, and has one of two consonant-vowel patterns: CVCCV or CCVCV (e.g. rafsi, bridi). The gismu are built so as to minimize listening errors in a noisy environment.

lujvo

When specifying a concept that is not found among the gismu, a Lojbanist generally attempts to express the concept as a tanru. tanru is an elaboration of the concept of 'metaphor' used in English. In Lojban, any brivla can be used to modify another brivla. The first of the pair modifies the second. Modifier brivla may thus be regarded as acting like English adverbs or adjectives. For example, skami pilno is the tanru which expresses the concept of 'computer user'.

When a concept expressed in a tanru proves useful, or is frequently expressed, it is desirable to choose one of the possible meanings of the tanru and assign it to a new, single brivla. In the example, we would probably choose the meaning 'user of computers', and form the single brivla sampli, out of the tanru skami pilno. Such a brivla, built from two or more component gismu, is called a lujvo.

Like gismu, however, lujvo have only one meaning. Unlike gismu, lujvo may have more than one form. This is because each gismu has between two and five combining forms called rafsi, which are joined together in order to form a lujvo (e.g. sam and skam for skami; pli and piln for pilno). Longer rafsi may be used in place of shorter rafsi; the result is considered the same lujvo, even though the word is spelled and pronounced differently. Thus brivla, itself a lujvo built from the tanru bridi valsi, is the same lujvo as brivalsi, bridyvla, and bridyvalsi – each using a different combination of rafsi.

fu'ivla

The use of tanru or lujvo is not always appropriate for very concrete or specific terms (e.g. brie or cobra), or for jargon words specialized to a narrow field (e.g. quark, integral, or iambic pentameter). These words are in effect 'names' for concepts, and the names were invented by speakers of another language. The vast majority of names for plants, animals, foods, and scientific terminology cannot be easily expressed as tanru. They thus must be 'borrowed' (actually 'copied') into Lojban from the original language, forming words called fu'ivla.

A borrowed word must be Lojbanized into one of several permitted fu'ivla forms. A rafsi is then attached to the beginning of the Lojbanized form, usually using a syllabic consonant as 'glue' to ensure that the resulting word is not construed as two separate words. The rafsi categorizes or limits the meaning of the fu'ivla; otherwise a word having several different jargon meanings in other languages (such as integral) would be unclear as to which meaning should be assigned to the fu'ivla. fu'ivla, like other brivla, are not permitted to have more than one definition.

cmavo

cmavo are the structure words that hold the Lojban language together. They often have no concrete meaning in themselves, though they may affect the semantics of brivla to which they are attached. cmavo include the equivalent of English articles, conjunctions, prepositions, numbers, and punctuation marks.

cmavo are recognized most easily by not being either cmene or brivla. Thus, they:

• may be a single syllable
• never contain a consonant cluster of any type, whether or not y is counted
• end in a vowel
• need not be penultimately stressed, though they often are if they have more than one syllable

All cmavo display one of the following letter patterns, where C stands for a consonant, and V stands for a vowel:

V VV V'V CV CVV CV'V

The letter pattern generally does not indicate anything about the grammar of the cmavo.

A sequence of cmavo can be written without intervening spaces, without any change to its meaning. Such a sequence is called a compound cmavo. For example, a set of digits comprising a longer number can be written as a single word (e.g. pareci = pa + re + ci = '123').

Note: As far as the stress rules of Lojban are concerned, however, these are still separate words. So you don't have to stress pareci as paREci.</blockquote> A small number of cmavo used in tanru have been assigned rafsi, so that they may aid in converting those tanru into lujvo.

Semantics

Lojban is designed to be unambiguous in orthography, phonology, morphology, and grammar. Lojban semantics, however, must support the same breadth of human thought as natural languages. Every human being has different 'meanings' attached to the words they use, based on their unique personal experiences with the concepts involved. So it is impossible to eliminate semantic ambiguity (the ambiguity embedded in the variable meanings of words when taken in context) completely.

Rather, Lojban attempts to minimize semantic ambiguity, partly by systematizing as much as possible about semantics, but mostly by removing the clutter and confusion caused by other forms of ambiguity.

brivla

Unlike words in most other languages, a brivla has a single meaning, which however may encompass a narrow or broad range of closely related submeanings. gismu tend to have more general meanings, while lujvo tend to have specific definitions; the compounding of gismu into lujvo allows expression of any desired degree of specificity. fu'ivla have a single narrow meaning.

The semantic definitions of brivla are closely tied to the 'predicate' nature of brivla, a topic discussed in detail in the grammar section below. In short, a brivla defines the relationship between a group of separate but related concepts, called its sumti.

brivla are not nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs; yet they incorporate elements of each. These different aspects are brought out in the way the brivla is used in the grammar, but the different grammatical environments do not change the meaning of the brivla.

brivla are an open-ended set of words; new lujvo and fu'ivla may be created as needed. Eventually, invented brivla will be collected and analyzed, and added to a formal dictionary. The definitions of all gismu, including their place structures, have already been specified. The place structure of a lujvo can generally be inferred from the place structures of its component gismu, using conventions which are generally useful though not hard-and-fast. fu'ivla are generally concrete terms, with simple and fairly obvious place structures. When there is uncertainty, listeners can ask about unknown or confusing place structures.

tanru

The heart of Lojban semantics is embedded in tanru. The meaning of a tanru is somewhat ambiguous: for instance, skami pilno could refer to a computer that is a user, or to a user of computers. There are a variety of ways that the modifier component can be related to the modified component. cmavo are used within tanru to prevent grammatical ambiguities, such as the various possible groupings of words in a phrase like pretty little girls school ({pretty {little {girls school}}}, {{pretty little} {girls school}}, {{pretty {little girls}} school}, and so on).

A speaker may use tanru to be arbitrarily general or specific. tanru are usually meant to be quite straightforward; tanru are always considered as a series of pairs of terms, a binary metaphor relationship. In such a relationship the first term by default modifies the second term. The terms may be brivla, certain cmavo such as numbers, or shorter tanru.

Connotation and Assertion

The connotative semantics of Lojban sentences – that is to say, the meaning contained not in the words themselves, but in the associations people make with them – is still relatively undefined. The same is true for the semantics of longer expressions or texts. There is as yet nothing clearly corresponding in Lojban to 'mood' or 'tone', no 'formal' or 'informal' styles, etc.

Because the language is oriented towards logic, the nature of the assertion in a statement, and whether it is true or false, are especially significant. Certain constructs in the language are described as making assertions, and having truth values (that is, being true or being false). Other constructs may modify those truth values, and still other constructs are interpreted independently from the truth of the statement.