Feel free to add questions to this faq whether you do or do not have the answer; as this is a place for people to learn about the language and hopefully to be interested enough to stay, it may be better if the more dramatic forms of wiki development (read impossible to keep up with and never reaching any consensus) were omitted. - mi'e greg.

'Please keep this page as a true FAQ and delete your debates over Lojban wording & sentence structure, and keep the content in English as well.'ok — greg.

  • What is Lojban for?
    • Lojban's predecessor, Loglan, was developed to provide a means of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Lojban came about when it appeared Loglan was stuck in a rut. Lojban was created because it seemed a shame to let all the fine ideas built into Loglan go to waste.In a sense it isn't for anything, in that it can be used for whatever you like :
      • First and foremost : expression
      • Mind expanding
      • Saying much more powerful things than in English
      • Saying something that should not be misinterpreted
      • Trying to get computers to understand you
  • How big is the Lojban community?
    • Difficult to say : Sales of the Reference Grammar are at around 450 copies, the mailing list has some 250 subscribers. The people on the wiki are the most frequent contributors. The number of active lojbanists is around 50. I encounter a surprisingly large number of randoms who know (at least vaguely, and usually a little incorrectly) what Lojban is. xod once interviewed at a place where, unbeknownst, the interviewer was an ex-Lojbanist from years back. I got the job.
    • Apparently there are some lojbanists in the Debian project, as well.
  • What are all those non-English words that are often found in people's posts?
    • 'pe'i': In my opinion
    • 'zo'o': This is the most common one, it is a more sophisticated lojban version of ;-)
    • 'mi'e': preceeds peoples' names at ends of posts
    • 'mu'o': corresponds to "over" in radio use: signals end of message and expectation of response.
  • What about all that Lojban jargon?
    • Meta-Lojban
      • attitudinal: A Lojban interjection (corresponding to "Wow!" or "Eek!" in English)
      • audiovisual isomorphism: Spoken and written Lojban should be the same
      • 'bridi': Lojban sentence - a "predicate"
      • 'brivla': any word that can state a relationship among several objects or concepts, and thus be the core word in a Lojban bridi - a "predicate word"
      • 'cmavo': Most are grammar words, fufilling the roles of pronouns, articles and prepositions in English.
      • 'cmene': Lojban names
      • evidential: special word indicating how the speaker got their information
      • 'fu'ivla': borrowed word
      • 'gismu': A "root-word", wherein are located most of the content of the language.
      • 'lujvo': compound word
      • place structure: the specified canonical order of sumti in a Lojban bridi, so that you know who is doing what to whom.
      • 'rafsi': Morphemes which can be combined following the lujvo creation rules to produce lujvo, which are compound words. They are analogous to the Latin word-roots we are used to, such as "duc" found in "induce", "reduce", "educate", "abduct", etc.
      • 'selbri': the part of a Lojban sentence that expresses the relationship between the various objects (sumti)
      • 'selma'o': part of speech
      • 'slinku'i': a hypothetical borrowed word, which would not be legal because it could be interpred as parts of other words in some contexts. Also seen as part of 'slinku'i test': a test which determines whether a hypothetical borrowed word would not be legal for those reasons.
      • 'sumti': an object or idea which may be related to others, that relationship being expressed in a Lojban bridi
      • 'sumti tcita': Lojban prepositions/adverbs
      • 'tanru': a phrase formed of two or more Lojban brivla
    • Handy abbreviations
  • What ongoing projects are there?
  • What can I do to help
    • Send a mail to Lojbab saying you'd like to help (lojbab@lojban.com)
    • Ask some questions, it seems we don't have any real Frequently Asked Question, so just add any question at the bottom.
  • What do you mean by "unambiguous"?
    • There is only one grammatical way in which a sentence can be interpreted. Thus, there can never be any doubt about the syntactic role which a word plays in a sentence.
  • What we don't mean by "unambiguous":
    • That you can spew out a sentence and have it clearly understood by anyone anywhere anytime. That just isn't possible. Humans depend on context for understanding, and you can't alleviate that need. More formally put: Lojban eliminates syntactic and morphological ambiguity, and constrains truth-conditional semantic ambiguity. It is impossible for any language in real use to eliminate pragmatic ambiguity, and Lojban fully allows such ambiguity. What is more important is that Lojban allows disambiguation, than that all its utterances are inherently unambiguous in all aspects.
  • What is a "logical" language?
    • One whose syntax is founded on first-order predicate logic.
  • What a "logical" language isn't:
    • Some cold language for use by machines to plot their takeover of mankind. Jokes, subtlety, and powerful emotions are possible in Lojban.
  • What you you mean by "culturally neutral"?
    • Lojban makes explicit the cultural biases that are often inherent in people's use of language. It does so by having its own bias: but this is a bias towards the conventions of formal logics, rather than of a specific human language or culture.
  • How long will it take for me to learn Lojban?
    • As with all questions of how long it takes to learn something, that depends on your natural aptitude, the time you put into it, your goals, and what it means to you to "learn a language".
    • It seems to become possible to develop a usable level of conversationality in about a year if you're highly interested, spend a modest amount of time, and are at least somewhat interested in developing fluency. The lack of local conversational speakers will hamper you.
  • What about Loglan ?
    • Lojban was created when it appeared that Loglan was going nowhere. It has the following advantages:
      • Although Loglan has revived a lot recently, it doesn't have as many followers, let alone people who have conversational ability, as Lojban.
      • Lojban was created with all the background of false starts provided by Loglan, it retains many of the original ideas, rejects some badly thought out concepts and adds a few of its own.
  • Who is...

  • Je ne comprends pas tres bien l'anglais ...
    • Tu peux contacter:
      • gregory.dyke@epfl.ch

  • Ich verstehe Englisch nicht sehr gut ...
    • Du kannst ein Mail senden zu:
      • gregory.dyke@epfl.ch

  • Я не силен в английском...
    • Свяжись со мной:
      • ilya_nikokoshev@mail.ru

  • mi na mulno kansa le glibau li'o
    • .u'i .iku'i do se bangu le lojbau
    • .e'a do skami mrilu
      • lojban@yahoogroups.com