Lojban | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

Lojban (pronounced ˈloʒban) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project. The Logical Language Group (LLG) began developing Lojban in 1987. The LLG sought to realize Loglan's purposes and further improve the language by making it more usable and freely available (as indicated by its official full English title, Lojban: A Realization of Loglan). After a long initial period of debating and testing, the baseline was completed in 1997 and published as The Complete Lojban Language. In an interview in 2010 with The New York Times, Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, stated, "The constructed language with the most complete grammar is probably Lojban—a language created to reflect the principles of logic." Lojban is proposed as a speakable language for communication between people of different language backgrounds, as a potential means of machine translation, and as a tool to explore the intersection between human language and software. The name "Lojban" is a compound formed from loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language). Lojban's predecessor, Loglan, a language invented by James Cooke Brown in 1955 and later developed by The Loglan Institute, was originally conceived as a means to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought (an assumption known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). As Brown started to claim his copyright on the language's components, bans were put on the language community's activities to stop changes to aspects of the language. In order to circumvent such control, a group of Loglan users decided to initiate a separate project, departing from the lexical basis of Loglan and reinventing the whole vocabulary, which led to the current lexicon of Lojban. To this effect, they established The Logical Language Group in 1987, based in Washington, D.C. They also won a trial over whether they could call their version of the language Loglan.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (18)

Constructed language

A constructed language (shortened to a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language, or (in some cases) a fictional language. Planned languages (or engineered languages/engelangs) are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning.

Lojban

Ithkuil

Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in an upcoming redesign.