Lojban: A constructed language, grammatically based on Predicate Calculus

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+Introductory+Brochure

6 33 17 years ago

human_v22• 17 years ago

Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous"

They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)

On a more serious note, this is rather exciting. It would make a very good candidate for a universal language. A great deal of time and effort went into making this language. Hopefully this isn't the last time I hear of Lojban.

DanielStraight9• 17 years ago

If you like this, you should read In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. Aside from the being the best non-fiction book I've ever read, it talks about Lojban and characteristics of invented languages that make them suitable for becoming a universal language. It turns out, Lojban would make a terrible universal language for precisely the reason I pointed out in my other post. It's too complicated. When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end. We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts. We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and'). Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it won't make them more clear when they talk, it'll make them not talk.

human_v22• 17 years ago

I agree that would disqualify it as a universal language candidate. At the same time though, how often do you wish you'd thought out your next sentence in its entirety when speaking to your girlfriend/boss/mother/etc ?

tijlan2• 17 years ago

  > When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end.

You can start and continue with a Lojban sentence indefinitely via various means. Metalinguistic markers such as sei ... se'u allows a discursive (on-the-fly) predicate or sentence. You can insert parenthetical notes with to ... toi into anywhere. You can insert the attitudinals (used to express attitudes, emotions, evidentiality, etc.) into anywhere. A construct called tanru allows an endless sequence of predicates (whose form in Lojban do not alter according to the natlang parts of speech such as adjective or adverb, thus imposing less restrictions on the way you keep forming a sentence than natlangs such as English does). With li'o you can omit any quantity of text you don't want in your expressions. With si/sa/su you can 'erase' various mistakes in your utterance. And so forth.

  > We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts.

That's what y is for in Lojban.

  > We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say

The unambiguity of Lojban is mostly syntactic, not always semantic. You can be semantically ambiguous in Lojban with e.g. tanru.

  > (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and').

Which includes ju'e, a vague connective for "and".

  > Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it

Which is not the case in Lojban.

RiderOfGiraffes8• 17 years ago

  > Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous"
  > They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)

I don't understand your point. The name of the language follows precisely the same rules of spelling and pronunciation. Can you expand on why you think otherwise?

eyeonus• 17 years ago

In Lojban,the letters which appear in the word Lojban are pronounced thusly:

L as in Logger; O as in wOn't; J as in aZure; B as in Boy; A as in wAter; N as in Nice;

Lojban is therefore pronounced LõZH-ban, with stress on "LõZH".

"Lojban" is a cmene (name) derived from the lujvo (compound word) "lojbau", a conjunction of "lojbo bangu", a tanru meaning "logical type-of language".

"Lojban" is not ambiguous as to spelling, being phonetic (unlike "phonetic") and also non-ambiguous in meaning, since the name for the logical language Lojban means "logical language".

Matt_Arnold2• 17 years ago

human_v2,

Although a few people want a Universal Language, the Logical Language Group which administers the Lojban language standard has never sought that as the purpose of Lojban. It is a thought experiment.

-Matt Arnold President, Logical Language Group

DanielStraight9• 17 years ago

What they don't tell you is that Lojban is so complicated no one can speak it. Go to the forums and pick almost any thread that contains Lojban, and you'll find debating about the language. If the supporters can't even speak it right, what hope if there for those who just want to communicate?

RiderOfGiraffes8• 17 years ago

My experience suggests that there are a handful of people who can read, write and speak the language fairly well, using it, when they choose, as their primary means of communication.

Most of the discussion falls into two types.

The first type is when a newbie tries to transliterate into lojban, and often says something they don't mean. This is common with anyone learning another language, it's just that in lojban one can be much more precise about what was wrong, because there's a formal grammar. Common confusions are mixing "verbs" with "nouns", neither of which have an exact matching concept in lojban, hence for some it's tough to get a grip on what's going on.

The second is debating the semantics. What does this word, explicitly created for lojban, actually mean? What's the difference between a pot and a jar? How, in English, do we decide which word to use? What is the defining characteristic of each?

These are often held up as criticisms of the language, but I think unfairly so. They provoke debates in epistomolgy, semantics and pragmatics, and touch on many of the questions that will need to be answered by the machine translation, semantic web and artifical intelligence challenges.

And what's the point in learning a language that's just a re-coding of your native language?

The other undeniable short-coming is that there is no underlying "culture." Much of the interest in learning, say, Russian, comes from the cultural insights. There is none of that in lojban.

Lojban isn't ready for generic, general purpose communication. It's still growing. If all you want is a tool, don't go there.

If you want mind-expanding concepts and debate, have a look.

frig4• 17 years ago

Can you give a slightly non-trivial lojban sentence with translation?

I'd prefer it be one you create so I can more easily ask you questions about it (as opposed to a web example).

DanielStraight9• 17 years ago

First of all, let me get something out of the way. There are no languages that are just re-coding of other languages.

I understand the idea behind Lojban but you've already conceded my point. Lojban is not a suitable language for communication.

dbrock3• 17 years ago

There are many people who can converse fairly well in real-time written Lojban (although vocabulary is limited, and some parts of the language are generally not used).

Due to audio-visual isomorphism, being able to converse in written Lojban almost implies being able (theoretically) to converse in spoken Lojban. However, people are generally much less used to speaking and hearing Lojban, so spoken conversations are usually somewhat difficult (definitely far from fluent).

dbrock3• 17 years ago

Go to #lojban on irc.freenode.net if you want to see Lojban conversation in action.

djanatyn• 17 years ago

As a speaker of lojban, I have to speak out. Lojban is not Ithkuil. Lojban isn't that complicated to speak, and most of the times on the forums, people are debating better ways to express sentences, not just because they're incorrect. Also, part of the lojbanic culture is to nag people if their grammar is incorrect. In English, most of the time, people may cringe or roll their eyes if they see someone saying something incorrectly, but it's considered polite in Lojban to correct someone's grammar. We also have a lot of beginners and new learners, so don't be too hard on them - they're just learning. There's a common misconception that logical = complicated, which is entirely not true. Lojban is in many places much simpler than English, and makes a lot more sense. I'll admit, there are a couple things which are more complicated, but lojban was built to be spoken by humans, and you don't have to be a genius to speak it. In short, it's logical - but not complicated!

Matt_Arnold2• 17 years ago

DanielStraight,

Consider a reasonably-popular, useful software package. At first, one might just toy around with it without sufficiently reading the documentation. Before long, one will learn to use it correctly, but not before getting a lot of error messages. That does not mean the software is impossible to use.

Lojban is similar, except that the only place you get error messages in Lojban is from other users. What you are seeing is a symptom of how active the Lojban community is, especially since being featured in an xkcd comic. Many newbies are attempting it before learning it. You are seeing a process of welcoming and educating newcomers that has become the norm in our community.

Consider the hypothetical software package again. You may wish to do something weird with it that is at the edges of its scope. You may need to make a feature request, or report flaky performance at a level for which the software is rarely used.

That is what you are seeing as well. Our debugging committee, the BPFK, is hashing out a lot of edge cases. However, these edge cases are tangential to the day-to-day usage of almost anyone, which is bug-free.

-Matt Arnold, President, Logical Language Group

Lojban: A constructed language, grammatically based on Predicate Calculus

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