darael asked: Formally, any sumti places left unfilled have an implicit {zo'e}, even if they're not the /last/ places due to use of place-tags. I can see two reasons for {zo'e} itself, the first being that while lojban encourages non-ambiguity, the language designers acknowledge that ambiguity can be useful. The second is that a {zo'e} can make it explicit that one has omitted a place - there are plausibly contexts in which it's useful to draw attention to that. Mostly, though, place-tags /are/ better.

Well, here you go, doi .lojban.anon.

Anonymous asked: Lojban Anon returning... I am curious now, considering Lojban is a conlang with a goal of unambiguity, why there is a "zo'e form". Why not mark each part with f* forms since it seems to mean the same thing and seems it would cause less confusion in spoken form where noisy places might cause a zo'e or two to be lost. I can see the alternate use of the se, te, etc. forms since it can create new word-phrase-meanings "lo tavla" vs. "lo se tavla"...

It’s mostly for the sake of briefness I suppose, but I don’t have a good answer for this one.

Anyone else knows a bit more about this?

Anonymous asked: Lojban Anon, and yes, that was immensely helpful! One more question (hah, maybe, I might be back for more depending on the answer) but the x1, x2, thing (does that have a name?) does that mean Lojban word order is fairly fixed? Because I get the impression then that "La london. klama la tom. la paris." would mean something different and probably not very sensible. Is the "co'e" thing, simply a general placeholder or is it the placeholder for x4 specifically?

The x things do indeed have a name. In English we use the words of the equivalent concepts in logic; so the “verb” is a predicate and the x things are arguments. The lojban words are however more commonly used, and those are “bridi” (for the “verb) and “selbri” for the x things.

And also whoops, darael showed out that I made a mistake: “co’e” is a placeholder only for a bridi, while “zo’e” is a general placeholder for a selbri. So everywhere I said “co’e” in my last reply it should’ve been “zo’e”. “zo’e” is not specifically for x4. “zo’e klama zo’e zo’e zo’e zo’e” is a perfecty valid sentence in lojban, even though it doesn’t mean much (“something goes to somewhere from somewhere via some route by some means of transportation”). If you wish not to indicate the “verb”, you can use “co’e”, the bridi equivalent of “zo’e”. Sentences with “co’e” usually don’t mean much out of context ( “mi co’e lo mlatu” = “I do something/am something about/with/from/to/… the cat”) but in a conversation where the bridi is evident it can be useful.

“la london. klama la tom. la paris.” would indeed mean “London goes to Tom from Paris”. Not very sensible. You could say the word order is fixed, to some extent. You can use special cmavo to indicate that you are switching the order of the sebri. Those words are:

• se (switch x1 and x2)
• te (switch x1 and x3)
• ve (switch x1 and x4)
• xe (switch x1 and x5)

Those words are put before the bridi. For example, saying “la paris. se klama la tom. la london.” is the same as saying “la tom. klama la paris. la london.” .

Those words are specially useful when making selbri with “lo”. As I explained in my last reply, from the gismu “tavla”, which is translated to

     tavla tav     ta'a talk                 'palaver'            x1 talks/speaks to x2 about subject x3 in language x4

“lo tavla” means “the thing/person which talks/speaks” = “the talker”. If we wish to say “The audience”, we could say “lo se tavla”. With “se”, we are switching the x1 and x2 of tavla, so instead of referring to the x1, the talker, we are referring to x2, the thing which is being talked to. “The audience is good” would be “lo se tavla cu xamgu” (cu is used to separate the bridi from the selbri. Here it is necessary because without it tavla xamgu would become a compound word ‘lo se [tavla xamgu]’ It is always correct to use “cu” but not always necessary.)

While making compound gismus (= lujvo), you can use “sel” the same way as “se”. selbri is a lujvo made from “se bridi”. Another well-known word made this way is selckiku (from se ckiku. ckiku = x1 is a key fitting/releasing/opening/unlocking lock x2, and having relevant properties x3 so selckiku is a lock, of the type that can be opened by a key)

Another, maybe even easier way to change the order of the selbri are the cmavo fa, fe, fi, fo and fu. They are used to indicate which selbri you are giving regardless of the order in the sentence.

• fa (now comes x1)
• fe (now comes x2)
• fi (now comes x3)
• fo (now comes x4)
• fu (now comes x5)

(NOTE: the order of the vocals; a e i o u; appears in other groups of words in lojban, like for example numbers: pa, re ci, vo mu, xa, ze, bi, so. This was done in order to make the language easier to remember.)

If you wanted to keep the order of the selbri in your example while making it mean “Tom goes to Paris from London”, you could say: “fi la london. klama fa la tom. fe la paris.”

When using those words, you do not have to put them on every selbri. In fact, the f* tags are commonly used to avoid having to say many “zo’e”; for examples if you only wish to specify the x1 and x4 of a verb. To say “I speak lojban”, we use the bridi “tavla”:

     tavla tav     ta'a talk                 'palaver'            x1 talks/speaks to x2 about subject x3 in language x4

So I speak lojban would be “mi tavla zo’e zo’e lo lojban” . Using the f* tags, it becomes “mi tavla fo lo lojban” (NOTE: lojban is a compound gismu (= lujvo) made from logji = logic and bangu = language).

One last alteration of order you can easily do is to move the place of the bridi (the “verb”). It is usually put in second position because it feels more natural for english speakers, but you can put it anywhere you want in the sentence. After a place introduced with a place tag, any trailing places follow it in numbering.

“tavla mi fo lo lojban” = “mi tavla fo lo lojban” = “mi fo lo lojban cu tavla”

for more info on the f* tags, go here

darael asked: WRT lojban-questioning anon: excellent explanation of selbri places. Since the asker complained about use of lojban words to explain the grammar, though, it might be useful to say explicitly that we use the lojban words for parts of speech because there isn't even an approximate one-to-one mapping to the English ones, so we'd have at least four translations of "gismu" that, to the English mind, are all mutually exclusive.

Of course. I didn’t mention it in my response because it sounded like I was being ~arrogant or something (“I understand that it is annoying for you that people use those but i’ll use them anyway”); but I do use bridi, selbri & co when thinking/talking about lojban.

Anonymous asked: Can you explain Lojban to me, as someone who is not a linguist (but does have a second language)? I want to learn it but most resources for learning are annoying as fuck and focus more on their pet philosophy than the language proper or use a bunch of Lojban words to explain the grammar which is terrible to my understanding because I do not speak Lojban yet. And I still can't figure out what those little mathematical seeming x1, x2, x3, x4 things are supposed to be.

Of course! So, i’ll start by saying that the best place to start learning lojban is the book “lojban for beginners” which is available online for free on various websites.

Okay now your questions:

In lojban there are 2 kinds of words: gismu and cmavo.

• Gismu are always 5 letters long. They are used like nouns and verbs and adjectives in english, and their function depends of where they are in the sentence. in “mi tavla” (≃ I speak), tavla is a gismu. in “lo mlatu cu blabi” (≃ The cat is white), mlatu and blabi are gismu.

All gismus represent an abstract relationship between multiple elements; for example, tavla represents the relationship of one person talking to another person (NOTE: in the sentence “mi tavla”, that other person is not specified). In that way there are very similar to verbs in English. If you say “John apple”, you don’t know the relationship between John and the apple. If we add a verb, “John eats apple” or “John wants apple”, the relationship is specified. What about the “mlatu” thing, you may ask! Mlatu is also representing an abstract relationship. Mlatu represents the relationship of “something being a cat of a certain race”. Most of the time the race is not specified to Mlatu can be translated to “to be a cat”. However in my sentence, “lo Mlatu cu blabi”, we use “mlatu” to say “a cat”; which is not a verb. That is because of the word “lo”. I won’t explain it all right now but you can see it as saying “The thing, which is a cat, is white”.

• Cmavo are grammatical words. They are like pronouns and preposition and determinants and others in english. There are very different than the english words and they have various functions in the sentences. In my examples, “mi”, “lo” and “cu” were cmavo. “Mi” means “I” or “me”; “lo” can be roughly considered as making “nouns” out of “verbs” (“mlatu” = “to be a cat”, “lo mlatu” = “The cat” or “The thing which is a cat”. Similarly, “tavla” = “to talk”, “lo tavla” = “the talker”, “the thing which talks”).

You can find the complete list of gismu with definition here and the complete list of cmavo here

Now about those mathematical-looking x things:

In engilsh, you use words like “to”, “with”, “from”, … to show the role that a words has in the sentence. For example, in the sentence “Tom goes to Paris from London by train”, the word “to” indicates that we are talking about the destination (Paris), “from” indicates the origin “London”, and “by” indicates the means of transportation. In lojban, instead of having those words to indicate the role that the different elements have in the relationship, we use the order in which those elements appear. X1 simply means “the first element appearing in the sentence”, X2 is the second, and so on. If we take a look at the translation of the word “to go” in the gismu list, we have

  klama     kla      come                                      x1 comes/goes to destination x2 from origin x3 via route x4 using means/vehicle x5

So, the gismu for “to go” is “klama”, and the first element of the sentence (x1) is the goer, the second element (x2) is the destination, x3 is the origin, x4 is the route and x5 the vehicle.

Knowing this, the sentence “Tom goes to Paris from London” can be translated to “la tom. klama la paris. la london.” (ignore the dots, they have to do with how lojban handles names. They just means that you have a pause in the speech in order to make clear that the name ends there, they don’t mean the end of the sentence. Also “la” is like “lo” but with names; it means “The thing/person which is named…”.).

The first element (x1) is “la tom.”

then comes the “verb”, “klama”

then the second element (x2) is “la paris.”

and the third element (x3) is “la london.”

and we do not specify x4 and x5.

If we want to say that Tom went by train (=If we want to specify x5, the means of transportation) without specifying x4, the route, we can use the words “co’e”, is a filler word indicating that that specific element of the sentence is not specified. So our sentence would be:

“la tom. klama la paris. la london. co’e lo trene”
 x1       verb      x2        x3           x4      x5
“The person which is named Tom goes to the thing which is named Paris from the thing which is named London [via a non-specified route] by the thing which is a train”
“Tom goes to Paris from London by train”

I hope that helps.

guilemaigre asked: Philanthropist... in lojban! =D

hmmm… a litteral translation would give {remxaure’a} (<human><beneficial-to><human>)

But if you want to be precise, you’d say {remna poi ke’a xamgu lo drata remna ku’o} I guess, which is roughly “human who is beneficial to <otherhuman>”

Lojban Lessons!

cizra:

I have found that explaining something new I am learning to some one else helps me learn it better. So I will be doing that with Lojban any the poor followers of my Tumblr will learn! MUahahahaha! So most of the information found in The Lojban Reference Grammar which is awesome.

So here are some reason Lojban is awesome

1. Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers. 
2. Lojban is designed to be neutral between cultures.
3. Lojban grammar is based on the principles of predicate logic.
4. Lojban has an unambiguous yet flexible grammar.
5. Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguously resolves its sounds into words.
6. Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
7. Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
8. Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exceptions.
9. Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
10. Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
11. Lojban has been demonstrated in translation and in original works of prose and poetry.

Pretty awesome huh?

(Source: ladylythrum)

I usually don’t mind when people have a look at what’s in my notebook

even if it’s semi-personal. I’ve been showing it to people for some time now and they usually don’t ask or comment on the more embarrassing things, or if they do they quickly drop the subject.

But this time I gave it to my mom to show her today’s pokeddex drawing and my younger brother then took my notebook, flicked through some pages and asked me “what is that?”

The that he was pointing with his finger was a lojban poem of some sort. They’re not really poems, I just sometimes write my feelings in lojban, because lojban has an amazing system for describing emotions. I said something like “Oh, that’s lojban. It’s not important” but he insisted that I tell him what it meant. No matter how much I tried to make him understand that I didn’t want to tell him what it meant >_> he kept insisting.

The poem was

{.uinaisai pu mi
.uinaisai ca mi
.uinaicai ba mi
.uico’e ba’o mi
.uinaicai mi}

which roughly translates into

strong-unhappiness-feeling tied to past-me
strong-unhappiness-feeling tied to present-me
very-strong-unhappiness-feeling tied to future-me
neither-happy-nor-unhappy-feeling tied to terminated-me (ba’o marks the future after the action (here “being myself”) is finished)
very-strong-unhappiness-feeling tied to me

So I just lied to him and changed unhappiness into “happiness.”

I’m probably the only person in the whole history of the universe to write my teenager-angst feelings in lojban. That’s pretty cool. But why did I have to get such a stubborn brother ghhh.

I’m not feeling this way anymore though. Like, I’ve been feeling pretty great lately. My art is improving. When I was younger I was always looking forward to the time where I would be able to just do things and have those things be good and have me be happy with those things that I had done; and now I feel like I’m there. I am that person I wanted to be. That makes me happy.

itwillshine asked: hello :) i was wondering where/how you learned lojban. i want to learn it, too.

I learned lojban with a friend (it’s easier to be motivated when you’re doing it with a friend, and you can chat /in lojban/ and it’s cool). I started with the only french resources there are about lojban, then I read the ebook “Lojban for beginners” . Google it, it’s fairly easy to find :)

Once you know the basics it’s not that hard. On Lojban.org you can find the list of all the gismu (≃nouns/verbs) and of all the cmavo (≃gramatical words) and start building sentences!

If you want, you can talk with me in lojban! that would be super cool! :D

Yeah, lojban is a great language, and learning it is a very interesting process. You learn a lot of things about languages in general, and you understand better how english works, how logic works and how your mind works.

My favorite part about lojban is its attitudinal system (a whole set of words to express every possible emotion); and just building a sentence is pretty cool, because you have to know precisely and exactly what you want to say.