Lojban: The Logical Language
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The first thing you need to do when you learn a foreign language is to become familiar with the sounds of the language and how they are written, and the same goes for Lojban. Fortunately, Lojban sounds (phonemes) are fairly straightforward.
These are pretty much the same as vowels in Italian or Spanish. The sixth vowel, y, is called a "schwa" in the language trade, and is pronounced like the first and last "A"s in "America" (that's English "America", not Spanish). It's the sound that comes out when the mouth is completely relaxed.
Two vowels together are pronounced as one sound (diphthong). Some examples are:
Double vowels are rare. Two examples are ii, which is pronounced like English "ye" (as in "Oh come all ye faithful") or Chinese "yi", and uu, pronounced "wu".
The English sounds "ch" and "j" are written as tc and dj.
Lojban
doesn't use the letters H, Q or W.
Lojban has no punctuation, but some of the characters normally used in punctuation affect the way Lojban is pronounced. A full stop (period) is a short pause to stop words running into each other. An apostrophe separates two vowels, and is pronounced like an H. For example, ui is normally pronounced "we", but u'i is "oohee".
Commas are rare in Lojban, but can be used to stop two vowels blurring together when you don't want to use an apostrophe (which would put a "h" between them). No Lojban words have commas, but they're sometimes used in writing non-Lojban names, for example pi,ER. (Pierre).
Capital letters are not normally used in Lojban. We use them in non-Lojban words (like Pierre) when the stress of a word is different from the Lojban norm. This is to put the stress on the last-but-one syllable, so, for example, kurmikce (nurse) is kurmikce, not kurmikce. The name "Juliette" would be written DJUli,et. if pronounced in an English way, but julIET. if pronounced as in French.
You don't have to be very precise about Lojban pronunciation, because the phonemes are designed so that it is hard to mistake one sound for another. This means that rather than one "correct" pronunciation, there is a range of acceptable pronunciation—the general principle is that anything is OK so long as it doesn't sound too much like something else. For example, Lojban r can be pronounced like the R in English, Scottish or French.
Two things to be careful of, though, are pronouncing Lojban i and u like Standard British English "hit" and "but" (Northern English "but" is fine!). This is because non-Lojban vowels, particularly these two, are used to separate consonants by people who find them hard to say. For example, if you have problems spitting out the zd in zdani (house), you can say "zIdani"—the first I is very short, but the second has to be long.
If you tried pronouncing the vowel combinations above, you've already said some Lojban words. Lojban has a class of words called "attitudinal indicators", which express how the speaker feels about something. The most basic ones consist of two vowels, sometimes with an apostrophe in the middle. Here are some of the most useful ones.
In English, people have started to avoid the word "pity", because it has come to have associations of superiority. .uu is just the raw emotion—if you wanted to express pity in this rather condescending way, you'd probably say .uuga'i—"pity combined with a sense of superiority," or .uuvu'e—"pity combined with a sense of virtue." There again, you would probably just keep your mouth shut.
You can make any of these into its opposite by adding nai, so .uinai means "I'm unhappy", .aunai is reluctance, .uanai is confusion ("I don't get it") and so on. You can also combine them. For example, .iu.uinai would mean "I am unhappily in love." In this way you can even create words to express emotions which your native language doesn't have.
Attitudinal indicators are extremely useful and it is well worth making an effort to learn the most common ones. One of the biggest problems people have when trying to speak in a foreign language is that, while they've learned how to buy a kilo of olives or ask the way to the post office, they can't express feelings, because many languages do this in a round-about way (outside group therapy, very few British people would say outright that they were sad, for example!). In Lojban you can be very direct, very briefly (there are ways of "softening" these emotions, which we'll get to in a later lesson). In fact, these attitudinals are so useful that some Lojbanists use them even when they're writing in English, rather like emoticons (those e-mail symbols like ;-) :-( etc.).
Watch any film where people don't know each other's language. They start off saying things like "Me Tarzan," which is as good a place to start learning Lojban as any. So here we go.
mi'e is related to mi, which is "I", "me" and so on. It's a good example of the apostrophe separating two vowels, and sounds a bit like "me hey".
I am lucky because my name goes directly into Lojban without any changes. However, there are some rules for Lojban names which mean that some names have to be "Lojbanised". This may sound strange—after all, a name is a name—but in fact all languages do this to some extent. For example, English speakers tend to pronounce "Jose" something like "Hozey", and "Margaret" in Chinese is magelita. Some sounds just don't exist in some languages, so the first thing you need to do is rewrite the name so that it only contains Lojban sounds, and is spelled in a Lojban way.
Let's take the English name "Susan". The two S's are pronounced differently—the second one is actually a Z—and the A is not really an "a" sound, it's the "schwa" we just mentioned. So "Susan" comes out in Lojban as suzyn..
You may have noticed the extra full stop (period) there. This is necessary because if you didn't pause, you might not know where the name ended and the next word began. In addition, if a name begins with a vowel, you need a full stop there as well. For example:
An important rule for Lojbanising names is that the last letter of a cmene (Lojban name) must be a consonant. Again, this is to prevent confusion as to where a name ends, and what is and is not a name (all other Lojban words end in a vowel). We usually use S for this, so in Lojban, "Mary" becomes meris. , "Joe" becomes djos. and so on. An alternative is to leave out the last vowel, so "Mary" would become mer. or meir..
A few combinations of letters are illegal in Lojbanised names, because they can be confused with Lojban words: la, lai and doi. So "Alabamas" can't be .alabamas. but needs to be .alybamas. , for example.
The final point is stress. As we've seen, Lojban words are stressed on the penultimate syllable, and if a name has different stress, we use capital letters. This means that the English and French names "Robert" come out differently in Lojban: the English name is robyt. in UK English, or rabyrt. in some American dialects, but the French is roBER..
To give an idea of how all this works, here are some names of famous people in their own language and in Lojban.
Where are these places?
Lojbanise the following names:
By now you should be able to Lojbanise your own name. However, if you prefer, you can translate your name into Lojban (if you know what it means, of course) or adopt a completely new Lojban identity. Native Americans generally translate their name when speaking English, partly because they have meaningful names, and partly because they don't expect the wasichu to be able to pronounce words in Lakota, Navaho or whatever!
All Lojban words end in a vowel, and although you can use them as names as they stand, it's common to leave out the final vowel to make it absolutely clear that this is a name and not something else (Lojban goes for overkill when it comes to possible misunderstanding). So if your name or nickname is Cat (Lojban mlatu), you can either add s like a normal cmene to make mlatus., or just chop the end off and call yourself mlat..
Here are a few examples:
There are usually alternative spellings for names, either because people pronounce the originals differently, or because the exact sound doesn't exist in Lojban, so you need to choose between two Lojban letters. This doesn't matter, so long as everyone knows who or where you're talking about.
Last modified: Mon Jun 27 23:11:10 PDT 2005
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