Talk:Lojban

Alice In Wonderland

how is it possible to translate Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland into a language which has an aim to eliminate ambiguity in lexis and grammar?

that's the reason artificial languages are so successful... or aren't they?

no they aren't LOL. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.83.180.2 (talk) 03:35, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

There's a difference between lexical ambiguity ("Will Will will the will to Will?"), syntactic ambiguity ("Police help dog bite victim."), both of which are lacking from Lojban in noise-free environments, and interpretive ambiguity (e.g, puns). It is still possible to construct Lojban sentences which have two or more equally plausible interpretations of meaning, and that would presumably be the basis of a translation of Lewis Carroll's work. 128.102.239.32 (talk) 17:47, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Pronouncing the comma

I've got the following from the on-line Reference Grammar, Chapter 3, Section 3, eighth paragraph:

"It is always legal to use the apostrophe (IPA [h]) sound in pronouncing a comma."

-- Dissident (Talk) 18:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I discussed it with the author of that book, and he says it should probably be considered an erratum. I'll keep this talk page apprised on any further developments.—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 00:11, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Isn't the comma rather pronounced as a glide (between vowels)?? As I had learned it, the apostrophe (comma above right) can be pronounced as IPA [h] but any kind of "unvoiced fricative" is allowed also. I for one never could imagine why a glottal stop or such couldn't do the job as well. (It is said to be paramount to not complicate things for people unable to articulate the H-sound, e.g. for Italians). Yet, I'll have a look into my The Complete Lojban Language. Wayasu (talk) 19:54, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

The glottal stop is reserved for the . character, as an alternative to an outright pause. Jozis. (talk) 15:07, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

"Apostrophe" and "comma" refer to very different things in this context. Apostrophe (') and comma (,). Apostrophe can be pronounced as any unvoiced fricative that isn't already the sound of some other letter—you wouldn't want it to be the same sound as "f" or "s", for example. The glottal stop is one of the valid pronunciations for "." and, therefore, it is not correct to use the same sound for the apostrophe.—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 21:57, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Sapir-Whorf

The description said that Lojban was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - such a description can be contradicted by reading given information on this very Wikipedia article. Lojban, from what I understand, was designed to be a usable Loglan, which would make its purpose very different. It does not seem to have one specific goal in mind, but various - an international auxiliary language being a more optimistic goal.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.90.164.4 (talk • contribs) 10:09, 26 January 2007 (UTC1)

Brivla

"All brivla, except for a handful of borrowings such as alga, have at least five letters."
The five letter rule is about the subcategory of gismu, alga is clearly a fu'ivla.
Codegrinder 21:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Surely fu'ivla are a type (albeit a rare one) of brivla? Jozis. (talk) 15:08, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Additional logo

I suggest that the logo proposed by Eppcott and cizra [1] (the one on which the favicon of Lojban.org is based) is introduced in addition to the main logo on the top of the article. I think it's one of the common and best graphic representations of Lojban. --Mednak 16:43, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't propose it, I like the original more. I just recreated the image using nicer SVG. --Cizra

Would you upload it? --Mednak 11:46, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I would very strongly prefer a return to Jamie Bechtel's Necker Cube proposal. The Master Charge logo should never have been adopted. 206.130.136.162 (talk) 13:53, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh my!!

It is uggly! Said: Rursus ☺ ★ 14:25, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean? --Mednak 11:45, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

The current Latin orthography of Lojban is indeed somewhat jarring, due to the non-standard use of the full stop, the comma and capital letters. I feel that this needs to be addressed by the Lojban community. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jozis. (talk • contribs) 15:09, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for not killing me. In the Swedish wikipedia I would have been dead by now. Beware of their smiling faces, any misstep, and You're dead! Said: Rursus (☻) 10:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Firefox add-on

A dedicated Lojban popup dictionary as a Firefox add-on has been suggested, but is still in the level of speculation as the present lexing and parsing system of Lojban does not cover JavaScript.

I'm not familiar with Lojban, but this sentence seems very odd. It seems to be saying that the reason a specialised Lojban dictionary add-on cannot be made is because there are no JavaScript-based parsing tools for Lojban. Actually that's a guess; taking it at face value it seems to be saying the opposite - that Lojban can't parse JavaScript.

On top of that confusion, I've never heard of a dictionary that does anything more complicated than conjugate or decline words into their possible lemmas, so why would a lack of parsing libraries stop development of a dictionary?--holizz 17:01, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Archives

The archives of the conversations are now accesible in two versions: one for the original, unedited format, and another for an organized collection enabling easier topical reference. The latter will be updated as a new discussion on this page is concluded or becomes inactive. --Mednak 11:28, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Internet Section addition

Webcomic "xkcd" did a strip on Lojban - http://xkcd.com/191/ The title tag of the image (viewable by hovering the mouse over it) reveals the phrase "zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi". I have not the slightest idea what this means. 58.7.212.229 12:40, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

[humor] that-there is-false [.] [request] [is-it-true?] you befriend me

In natural English, "Just kidding; I don't mean it. Please don't hate me?" 218.111.47.55 02:07, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Series of Lojban articles?

Given that there's a series of articles for Esperanto, including Esperanto as an international language, Esperanto vocabulary, and Esperanto and Ido compared, should similar articles be made for Lojban? 69.80.147.216 16:25, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it can be compared to other languages other than log-langs, and there are comparissions in this article, but they would be a stub by themselves —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.135.156.71 (talk) 03:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Adding entry for Commons:Babel

Has anyone considered adding an entry for Commons:Babel? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Erth64net (talk • contribs) 21:17, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

pixra's photograph/illustration merging

Photograph actually can be produced by using kacmyxra (obtained from Lojban's site) or by using the phrase ¨(the photo) PIXRA (of ---) (took by ---) LE KACMA. Of course, neither PIXRA nor KACMA may be capitalized —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.135.156.71 (talk) 03:35, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

phoneme, allophone

• "Lojban is rather defined by the phonemes (spoken form of words)" (Orthography)
• "The sounds may be allophoned." (Phonology)

These sentences show serious misunderstanding of the meaning and usage of these linguistic terms. --Thnidu (talk) 02:48, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

I think both passages are wrong on usage but correct on intended sense. The first passage is saying that Lojban has no single correct orthography—any orthography that unambiguously represents the underlying morphemes is equally correct. The latter is saying that the Lojban phonemes include a nontrivial number of allophones. Both of these assertions are correct. They should be reworded.—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 02:59, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

"Others" section

Why? writing The Lord's Prayer & making the article feels like a religious preach, instead of making it more benifitial to write a sample for the declaration of human rights :( --Mahmudmasri (talk) 19:22, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I think you make a good point. Translations of the Lord's Prayer have traditionally been used in Western countries for language comparison, because the New Testament of the Bible is so widely translated. This has become and old-fashioned tradition and is no longer seen as having religious implications. However, the use of Christian religious material might well seem jarring to people from other parts of the world. Given Lojban's stated purpose of general cultural neutrality, I think that is definitely a bad thing.

An additional issue is that the current version of the Lord's Prayer included here contains some archaisms (it dates, I believe, to the early 90s) which are not considered to be grammatically correct now. There will be a new version of the Lord's Prayer available in the near future, but I would suggest that we should go ahead and remove the prayer from this article right away. As a replacement language sample, we can use the Lojban version of "The North Wind and the Sun".—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 03:42, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, http://www.omniglot.com uses, for the most part, article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, maybe that would be an alternative? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 06:54, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

"Lojbanisms"?

"Some unique Lojbanic expressions", couldn't that be called "Lojbanisms" by the current rules of English? Said: Rursus (☻) 10:27, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Auxiliary?

Although Lojban could be used as an auxiliary language, that is neither its main intent nor its proper classification. So why is section five entitled "Comparison with other auxiliary languages"? Should it not be "Comparison with other constructed languages"? I am going to go ahead and change this. --n-k, 17:13, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

While we're fixing this, I've refined it to "Comparison with other logical languages", since (unless I've overlooked something) all of the languages it's compared to are loglangs. Pi zero (talk) 17:29, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Merge section 4.1 and external links?

Section 4.1 contains a list of links which probably belong in the external links section. Should they be moved? --N-k, 16:03, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Comparison to Ilaksh

I noticed that there is no comparison with Ilaksh. Is there anyone here with the knowledge to compare the two?AndreasBWagner (talk) 21:22, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Predicate Logic or First-order Logic

I see that in the first sentence of this article, the words "predicate logic" link to an article about "First-order logic". As there is also an article about predicate logic, to which article should the link most appropriately link? If the current link is best, shouldn't the words on which the user clicks then be changed from "predicate logic" to "first-order logic"?--~ ~ : Lincoln Cooper : ~ ~ (talk) 12:30, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Pronunciation of ⟨e⟩

It is stated here that the preferred allophonic pronunciation of the grapheme ⟨e⟩ is [e] and the secondary pronunciation is [ε]. Any version of The Comlete Lojban Language (or rather the Lojban Reference Grammar) states that it is the other way round with IPA:[ε] X-SAMPA:[E] being the preferred one. Can anyone clarify this? Buriaku (talk) 00:22, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Stress

I see that stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable, ok. But what happens with monosyllabic words? Are they stress-less, sounding like if they were part of the following word? Or they are exceptionally stressed? Please put it clear, and we will be able to pronounce Lojban. --Xabadiar (talk) 17:44, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Stress is obligatory and penultimate in content-type words (brivla), the equivalent of verbs, nouns, and adjectives. For particles, which can be polysyllabic, stress can be placed on any syllable, except that the final syllable before a word with obligatory stress must itself be unstressed. So, if I say {lo mikce cu glico gi'e na'e merko}, then the syllables mik-, gli-, and mer- must receive stress, and the syllables gi'e na may be stressed according to the speaker's preference, but the other syllables must not be stressed.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 05:31, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. So it seems that monosyllabic words are normally stress-less, sounding like if they were part of the following word. Actually this seems to be the norm in natural languages: "he's from Italy" will sound "hes fromitaly".--Xabadiar (talk) 06:58, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes. One of the reasons that Lojban has a specific stress pattern is that it avoids the need to have clear breaks between words. Lojban words can be run together as if they were one word without becoming ambiguous unless there is hiatus of two vowels or in the case of proper names. Monosyllables can be stressed if found in some positions, but in practice they do often appear immediately before brivla, in which case they must be unstressed.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 12:18, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

References are broken

[11] points to reference item 11. [14] points to reference item 12. I have no idea why. ArthurDent006.5 (talk) 07:13, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Don't we need a criticism section?

If the language has no genuine problems, and no perceived problems, why aren't we all rushing to learn it? If it does have genuine or perceived problems, why don't we have a Criticism section? Tlhslobus (talk) 12:17, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

• algorithmically derived gismu lose their initial form and thus hard for learning by most people. link?
• [x] phoneme is called "cough-letter" http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=borrowing_from_Loglan
• still no machine translation based on lojban. link to such criticism?

Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 08:02, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Lojsk, Voksigid, gua\spi

These three conlangs have a minuscule representation on the web. Do we need them here? I removed links to them since it is unlikely they will get there articles but may be remove these sections completely? mw.lojban.org wiki (mediawiki engine) can store them if someone is afraid of losing this content.Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 07:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I finally removed Lojsk and Voksigid. I consider them of low importance and relevance to Lojban. Many more logical conlangs have been created by far. The removed text follows.Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 09:50, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Lojsk

Lojsk was conceived by Ari Reyes, heavily influenced by Loglan, Lojban, Universal Networking Language (UNL), Esperanto, Visual Basic, Dutton's Speedwords, Ceqli and Gua\spi. It is designed to be more single-syllable oriented. If possible, that would nonetheless lead Lojsk to be more sensitive to noisy environments than Lojban is; therefore its practicality in oral communication may be questioned.^[2]

Voksigid

Voksigid, created by an Internet working group led by Bruce R. Gilson, attempts to construct a predicate language of a different type from those which had gone before. Its syntax was somewhat influenced by Japanese, and its vocabulary was based mostly on European language roots. Loglan and Lojban both use word order to mark the various places in the predication, but because remembering which position means which role in the predication might be beyond easy memorization for most people, Voksigid was designed in order to overcome this issue. It uses an extensive set of very semantically specific prepositions to mark the roles of verb arguments, instead of positional order as in Loglan and Lojban.

simplicity as a design criterion.

I commented out this line:

* It does not have [[simplicity]] as a design criterion.

Any sources of where this phrase comes from? Simplicity in what? Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 18:05, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Simplicity as in "easy to learn". The main design criterion of Esperanto and many other constructed languages. Of course, what's easy to learn depends a lot on your own native language, and therefore isn't culturally neutral.

The North Wind and the Sun

The translation used used incorrect Lojban. I replaced it with a newer one from the website. Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 18:21, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

How is it based on predicate logic?

Given that the reference grammar is the only description of the language links are needed to explain that Lojban is " based on predicate logic". Until then restoring this assertion isn't desirable.Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 13:17, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

modular structure of lojban expressions?

• I deleted this paragraph: "Lojbanic expressions are modular; smaller constructs of words are assembled into larger phrases so that all incorporating pieces manifest as a possible grammatical unity. This mechanism allows for simple yet infinitely powerful phrasings; "a more complex phrase can be placed inside a simple structure, which in turn can be used in another instance of the complex phrase structure"." I don't how Lojban is different from other languages. Maybe add something on peculiarities of its syntax in regard to this modularity? Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 14:24, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Lojban today - does it even live on?

The Lojban Wikipedia is utterly inactive, and their homepage seems quite moribund. The last "news" item is from January (see right side bar), the "article of the month" template for November 2017 is empty (to say nothing of the fact that it is already December) and the recent changes for the last 30 (!!) days only show a few nearly meaningless contributions by exactly one user. There are a lot of inactive Wikipedias, but if even the official website is inactive, can't we conclude that the entire movement is dead or dormant? Of course there is a real world in addition to the world on-line. But this language relies so much on the Internet for its dissemination that it would certainly leave traces if it still lived to any extent. Even Volapük seems to be more active... Steinbach (talk) 15:17, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

http://www.lojban.org/resources/irclog/lojban/ are the "traces" that prove it still lives on in the form of chats. Reonic (talk) 15:21, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

If a community still uses IRC by 2017, it's probably not very vibrant or getting new members, but fair enough, Lojban is being used actively. And apart from that? Any promotional activities? Any original or translated literature coming out? It used to be that way... Steinbach (talk) 15:33, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Lojban has been using mostly chats for a long time and has hardly been a literary language ever. What do you suggest to add to the Wikipedia page in regard to this? As for IRC currently there is a synchronizing bridge relay between Telegram, Slack, Gitter, Discord and IRC. Different Lojbanists thus use different sides of the bridge. The front age of mw.lojban.org has links to them (in fact it's in the top part of the front page). I'm not aware of any large texts coming out since almost no one is interested in that (indeed, what for?). The activity that interested me right now is creating a high-quality parallel corpus of Lojban and English phrases that can be later used for tutorials and machine translation. However, none of this seems relevant to this very Wikipedia page. Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 05:56, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

I suggest that the page include at least something about what happened during the last 15 years. This can be waning interest, or a shift to chatting, or whatever. The History section currently stops at 2002. This made me curious, and after a quick search revealed very little activity. Btw, I do have my ideas what good longer texts in Lojban might be, or why the website could look a little more up to date, but since Wikipedia is not a forum, these are not very relevant here. Steinbach (talk) 11:46, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

The story of Lojban in some way ended in 2003 since this is the year when the "freeze" period was over as the Logical Language Group backdated in its statement in 2002. There is Lojban timeline from where one can add more stuff to "History" section of the wikipedia page.Gleki.arxokuna (talk) 12:21, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Lojban as a speakable logic

As it stands, the section "Lojaban as a speakable logic" states that "Lojban has been shown[40] to be translated in some of its parts into predicate logic." This could use some expansion. I'm assuming that "translated" ought to read "translatable", but then the statement is really weak, since any language is partially translatable into predicate logic. Presumably something more precise is being claimed.