What is Lojban?
Lojban (pronounced “LOZH-bahn”) is a constructed language. Previous versions of the language were called “Loglan” by Dr. James Cooke Brown, who founded the Loglan Project and started the development of the language in 1955. The goals for the language were first described in the open literature in the article “Loglan”, published in Scientific American, June, 1960. 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. 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 neutral between cultures. Lojban grammar is based on the principles of predicate logic. Lojban has an unambiguous yet flexible grammar. Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguously resolves its sounds into words. Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn. Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words. Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exceptions. Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication. Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical. Lojban has been demonstrated in translation and in original works of prose and poetry.
What is this book?
This book is what is called a “reference grammar”. It attempts to expound the whole Lojban language, or at least as much of it as is understood at present. Lojban is a rich language with many features, and an attempt has been made to discover the functions of those features. The word “discover” is used advisedly; Lojban was not “invented” by any one person or committee. Often, grammatical features were introduced into the language long before their usage was fully understood. Sometimes they were introduced for one reason, only to prove more useful for other reasons not recognized at the time.
By intention, this book is complete in description but not in explanation. For every rule in the formal Lojban grammar (given in Chapter 21), there is a bit of explanation and an example somewhere in the book, and often a great deal more than a bit. In essence, Chapter 2 gives a brief overview of the language, Chapter 21 gives the formal structure of the language, and the chapters in between put semantic flesh on those formal bones. I hope that eventually more grammatical material founded on (or even correcting) the explanations in this book will become available.
Nevertheless, the publication of this book is, in one sense, the completion of a long period of language evolution. With the exception of a possible revision of the language that will not even be considered until five years from publication date, and any revisions of this book needed to correct outright errors, the language described in this book will not be changing by deliberate act of its creators any more. 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 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.
It is probably worth mentioning that this book was written somewhat piecemeal. Each chapter began life as an explication of a specific Lojban topic; only later did these begin to clump together into a larger structure of words and ideas. Therefore, there are perhaps not as many cross-references as there should be. However, I have attempted to make the index as comprehensive as possible.