Reader Adam introduced me to Logjam – er, Lojban, an artificially constructed language, like Esperanto. However, according to the Logical Language Group, its purpose is not to be an international language:
Lojban was not designed primarily to be an international language, however, but rather as a linguistic tool for studying and understanding language. Its linguistic and computer applications make Lojban unique among proposed international languages: Lojban can be successful without immediately being accepted and adopted everywhere, and Lojban can be useful and interesting even to those skeptical of or hostile towards the international language movement.
Its claim to not distinguish between nouns, verbs, and adjectives seems to be belied by this question and answer:
What is the standard word order of Lojban?True, Lojban is “built up from a list of around 1350 root words (gismu)” which can be nouns, verbs or adjectives – but Indo-European and Semitic roots also work this way. However, I do give the language’s inventors credit for creating a language that is totally un-Indo-European in structure – and perhaps un-human as well. Take a look at this sentence:
Lojban is only secondarily a 'word order' language at all. Primarily, it is a particle language. Using a standard word order allows many of the particles to be 'elided' (dropped) in common cases. However, even the standard unmarked word order is by no means fixed; the principal requirement is that at least one argument precede the predicate, but it is perfectly all right for all of the arguments to do so, leading to an SOV word order rather than the currently canonical SVO (subject–verb–object): the two orders are equally unmarked syntactically. VSO order is expressible using only one extra particle. In two-argument predicates, OSV, OVS, and VOS are also possible with only one particle, and various even more scrambled orders (when more than two-place predicates are involved) can also be achieved.
le prenu cu klama le zdani le briju le zarci le karce
The person goes to the house from the office via the market using the car.
The definition of the brivla [“verb” - DB] used above, klama, shows this relationship. There are five places labelled x1 through x5. The brivla itself describes how the five places are related, but does not include values for those places. In this example, those places are filled in with five specific sumti [“noun” – DB] values:· x1 contains le prenu (the person)
· x2 contains le zdani (the house)
· x3 contains le briju (the office)
· x4 contains le zarci (the market)
· x5 contains le karce (the car)
I don’t think that any natural language requires its speakers to count to more than 2, certainly not to 5! True, these places may be optionally marked by prepositions: fa, fe, fi, fo, fu – but this syntax seems inspired by mathematical or computer notation in which counting argument places is the norm, for example:
f (x1, x2, x3, x4, x5)
is a function with five arguments. In most programming languages this would look something like:
cu-klama (le-prenu, le-zdani, le-briju, le-zarci, le-karce)
If, on the other hand, the prepositions were mandatory, it would look like – a URL!
cu-klama?fa=le-prenu&fe=le-zdani&fi=le-briju&fo=le-zarci&fu=le-karce
Posted by David Boxenhorn at May 16, 2004 03:23 PMGiven the example sentence above, you could consider a brivla a verb and a sumti a noun, but all Lojban sentences have the same structure. For example, it's easy to consider "klama" a verb is the sentence le prenu cu klama le zarci (the person goes to the store), but what is "patfu" in the sentence le prenu cu patfu mi (The person is my father), and what is "clamau" in le prenu cu clamau mi (The person is taller than me)? In English, you have a verb, a noun, and an adjective, each dictating a different structure for the sentence, but in Lojban there is only one structure for all three: argument1 cu predicate argument2.
Lojban syntax definitely is inspired by mathematical notation; it is inspired by formal logic. (Lojban means "logical language" in Lojban.)
The large number of arguments that a word like klama can have is certainly un-Indo-European, but I think that that in particular is secondary to what makes Lojban interesting, and ultimately just obscures the interesting parts. Human languages can easily deal with three arguments ("He gave me the ball."), and I think that basically Lojban predicates could have been confined to three arguments, if that had been a design consideration. You can see my rant on the subject on the Lojban wiki at here, though it contains a lot of Lojban-specific jargon.
Posted by: Adam at May 17, 2004 05:58 AM PermalinkThanks, Adam. I just read your comments on the Lojban wiki (and quickly realized that fully understanding them would require more time than I have…). I like having a Lojban expert among my readers!
You’re right – I should have said “counting to 4” in my post, as there are only 4 arguments after the predicate. I suppose that humans could easily deal with up to 4 arguments without having to count to more than 2 by making the standard sentence structure x1 x2 cu predicate x3 x4. This would correspond to an SOV word order, with up to two indirect objects after the verb. (I think, though, that I would prefer just making prepositions mandatory for arguments after x2.)
My point about nouns and verbs was that Lojban sentence structure distinguishes between arguments and predicates, and I don’t see any difference between that and distinguishing between nouns and verbs. The fact that the same word can be used for both an argument and a predicate is not unusual, we do it even in English!
In contrast, there really is no special grammatical category like adjective. If I understand correctly, Lojban adjectives are exactly like verbs (predicates).
Another way of looking at Lojban would be to say that it has one verb: cu. This would correspond to REST, as I said in an earlier post.
How would you say: My father is tall?
Posted by: David Boxenhorn at May 17, 2004 11:17 AM Permalink