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The language itself shares many of the features and goals of Loglan; in particular
While the initial goal of the Loglan project was to investigate the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the active Lojban community has additional goals for the language, including
Like most languages with few speakers, Lojban lacks an associated body of literature. A Lojban-language version of the Wikipedia open-source encyclopedia was begun in August 2004.
The Lojban alphabet consists of the 26 characters ' , . a b c d e f g i j k l m n o p r s t u v x y z; that is, it consists of the Latin alphabet without the three letters h q w but with three additional letters. The alphabetical order is as shown above, which is (intentionally) the same as the sort order of those characters in ASCII.
Capital letters are also used, but only to mark a stressed syllable in a word when the stress is on a non-standard syllable (for example, in proper names). Capital letters are not considered separate letters of the alphabet. It is optional whether only the stressed vowel or the entire stressed syllable is capitalised; for example, the name "Josephine" could be rendered as either DJOzefin. or djOzefin. Without the capitalisation, the ordinary rules of Lojban stress would cause the 'ze' syllable to be stressed.
Some of the letters have multiple permitted realisations. Note in particular that Lojban vowels can be either rounded or unrounded. Typical realisations are given in the following table:
| Letter | X-SAMPA | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ' | [h], [T] | an unvoiced glottal or dental fricative |
| , | --- | the syllable separator |
| . | [?] | a glottal stop or a pause |
| a | [a], [A] | an open vowel |
| b | [b] | a voiced bilabial stop |
| c | [S], [s`] | an unvoiced coronal sibilant |
| d | [d] | a voiced dental/alveolar stop |
| e | [E], [e] | a front mid vowel |
| f | [f], [p\] | an unvoiced labial fricative |
| g | [g] | a voiced velar stop |
| i | [i] | a front close vowel |
| j | [Z],[z`] | a voiced coronal sibilant |
| k | [k] | an unvoiced velar stop |
| l | [l], [l=] | a voiced lateral approximant (may be syllabic) |
| m | [m], [m=] | a voiced bilabial nasal (may be syllabic) |
| n | [n], [n=], [N], [N=] | a voiced dental or velar nasal (may be syllabic) |
| o | [o], [O] | a back mid vowel |
| p | [p] | an unvoiced bilabial stop |
| r | [r], [r\], [4], [R\], [r=], [r\=], [4=], [R\=] | a rhotic sound |
| s | [s] | an unvoiced alveolar sibilant |
| t | [t] | an unvoiced dental/alveolar stop |
| u | [u] | a back close vowel |
| v | [v], [B] | a voiced labial fricative |
| x | [x] | an unvoiced velar fricative |
| y | [@] | a central mid vowel |
| z | [z] | a voiced alveolar sibilant |
Two frequent combinations are the affricates tc [tS] and dj [dZ], which represent one sound ( phoneme) each in English but are considered a combination of two phonemes in Lojban.
Lojban has three parts of speech: one (called brivla) for both common nouns and verbs, one (called cmene) for proper nounsA noun or noun substantive is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. Nouns are parts of speech and can be classified in different ways such as proper nouns (e. Janet") versus common nouns (e. girl"), or collec, and another (called cmavo) for structural particles: articles, numerals, tense indicators and other such modifiers. The cmavo are further subdivided into selma'o, which are closer to the notion of parts of speech (e.g. UI includes interjections and discursives). There are no adjectives or adverbs in the sense that Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages include some 443 ( SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Contemporary language have them. The articles inflect to indicate individual, mass, set, or typical element. Brivla do not inflect for tense, person, or number; tense is indicated by separate cmavo, but grammatical number is absent. All brivla, except for a handful of borrowings such as alga, have at least five letters.
As befits a logical language, there is a large assortment of conjunctions. Logical conjunctions take different forms depending on whether they connect sumti (the equivalent of noun phrases), selbri (phrases that can serve as verbs; all brivla are selbri), parts of a tanru (a construct whose closest English equivalent is a string of nouns), or clauses in a sentence.
The typology is Subject Verb ObjectIn linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO is the sequence 'subject verb object' in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges''. Languages are classified according to the dominant sequence of these constitutents of sentences. This sequence is the second, with Subject Object VerbSubject Object Verb (SOV) is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of words in a language's sentences: "Sam oranges ate". The SOV type is the most common type found in natural languages. It corresponds roughly to reverse Polish not also common. Word formation is synthetic; many basic five-letter brivla (called gismu) have one to three three-letter forms called rafsi which are used in making longer brivla. For example, gasnu means "to make something happen"; its rafsi -gau regularly forms compounds meaning "to cause...x", in which the agent is in the subject place of the new predicate.
Lojban has a positional case system, though this can be overridden by marking predicate arguments with explicit modal particleModal particles are always uninflected words, and are a type of grammatical particle. Their only function is that of reflecting the mood or attitude of the speaker or narrator, in that they are not reflexive but only change the mood of the verb. See alsos. For instance bramau means "is bigger than"; the bigger thing is in first position, and the smaller is second, and the measured property in the third (see also postfix notation). So mi bramau do le ka clani means "I am bigger than you in the property of height" or "I am taller than you"; but this could also be expressed as something like fi le ka clani fe do fa mi bramau, "In height, you are exceeded by me".
What a particular place means depends entirely on the brivla. For animals and plants the second place is the species, variety, breed, or other taxon; for verbs of measurement it is the numerical measurement, and a further place is the standard; for klama ("go"/"come") it is the destination.
Something of the flavor of Lojban (and Loglan) can be imparted by this lightbulb jokeThe lightbulb joke is an example of an endless-variations joke and has possibly thousands of versions covering every imaginable culture, belief, occupation and special-interest group. Generally the punchline is not complimentary to the group providing the:
Q: How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?
A: Two: one to decide what to change it into, and one to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.
This makes use of two features of the language; first, the language attempts to eliminate polysemyPolysemy is the state of being a polyseme i. a word or phrase with multiple meanings, such as "The child started to walk''. and "My mother used to dance the Lambeth Walk''. Although closely related in meaning to homonym, lexicographers distinguish between; that is, having a phrase with more than one meaning. So while the English word "change" can mean "to transform into a different state", or "to replace", or even "small-denomination currency", Lojban has different words for each. In particular, the use of a brivla such as the word for "change" ("binxo") implies that all of its predicate places exist, so there must be something for it to change into. Another feature of the language is that it has no grammatical ambiguities that appear in English phrases like "big dog catcher", which can mean either a big person who catches dogs or a person who catches big dogs. In Lojban, unless you clearly specify otherwise with cmavo, such modifiers always group left-to-right, so "big dog catcher" is a catcher of big dogs, and a "broken light bulb" is a bulb that emits broken light (you can also avoid the ambiguity by creating a new word, so "broken lightbulb" has the intended meaning).
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