Lojban

coi
Jadı!

.i do mo
Hıa súq? (≈ Foa súq hí?)

.i mi tcidu su'o cukta
Noaq jí sá kue.

.i xu do nelci le kosta poi mi dasni ke'a
Ma cho súq jáke, ꝡë geı jí hóa?

Lojban (󱚼󱛊󱛃󱚾󱚹󱚲󱚺󱛂 Lójıbaq) is a loglang from the nineties. It was inspired by, and born out of a surreal legal conflict with, Loglan. Originally described in The Complete Lojban Language ("the CLL"), the language has since developed into a family of closely-related unofficial dialects. It boasts dozens of speakers, and remains the most popular loglang as of 202X.

Officially, Lojban is managed by a dysfunctional non-profit called the Logical Language Group ("the LLG").

Hoemaı, as la selpahi, was an active Lojban speaker and LLG member in the 2010s, and worked on various reforms that sought to simplify the language or give its semantics more rigor. Eventually, their efforts turned toward creating Toaq — a new loglang unburdened by the design quirks of Lojban. Many Toaqists are also (ex-)Lojbanists.

Properties

Lojban's noteworthy characteristics versus Toaq include the following:

A mostly-lowercase orthography with . and ' as part of the alphabet.
An elaborate morphology where particles, roots, compounds, loans, and names all have different word shapes.
A tense system that tries to unify space and time.
Compound words are formed by combining affix forms of roots: cukta (book) + pagbu (part) = ckupau (chapter).
Placing verbs side-by-side makes a tanru, a sort of semantically very loose serial verb construction: cukta pagbu (book part) could mean "part of a book" or "part where the books are" or "the part concerning books", et cetera. These are very common.
Many "spoken emoticon" words like .ui (yay!) and .u'u (sorry) and .a'o (I hope). They are like interjections that paint specific constituents with emotional connotation.
There are many circumfix constructions whose trailing particles (terminators) can be omitted depending on context. For example, ë … in Lojban is nu ... kei, but the kei may often be covert.

The CLL is a big book, but it leaves a lot unsaid about turning parses into logical formulas. A lot of time is spent unpacking Lojban's more baroque features, such as an algorithm that assigns scores to compound words, a mathematical sub-language, or "tense journeys". While concepts such as negation and scope are explained in depth informally, their interactions are often left vague. The most developed "semantic parser" (a Kuna equivalent) for Lojban is la tersmu.

Properties

See also