Talk:Lojban/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Lojban. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Comparison with Loglan

I think the section about difference between Lojban and Loglan is too large and insignificant to the article. Imagine you are a person who has never heard of Lojban, and wants to know about it. Why should it read these technical details about another language that may be regarded as dead? Inego 02:53, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Older discussion

"It is, nonetheless, simple to learn and use compared to many natural languages. " This is usually said about all constructed languages. However, how can you say that when there are so few fluent speakers? < 10 last time I heard...

Experience has shown that it takes a significantly shorter period of serious study to speak Lojban at a conversational level than other languages which are not closely related to one's native language, though there have never been any valid scientific studies of it.

WTF??? Only reading about it causes me a serious headache... I think even Japanese would be much easier if it hadn't kanji and honorifics, and I am an Italian speaker... Lobjan is more similar to any programming language than any two natural languages are... --Army1987 17:57, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

la lojban. .ue mo

(Lojban [surprise] what is it?)

The above, IMHO, simply does not convey information in a clear, simple way that can be expected out of encyclopedia articles, so I have removed it. It also doesn't (clear) convey any information that is not inferrable from the fact that this is, after all, an encyclopedia article about Lojban! --LMS

I just realized that the following is a mere adaptation--made by myself as it happens (I should have checked it for possible copyright problems)--of the text on http://www.lojban.org . There is a license of sorts on the website, but I believe that we can't use it on Wikipedia according to that license. Please, please, whoever uploaded this text, whenever you copy text from another source, please discuss why you've done so and your permissions/rights to do so on the /Talk page. --LMS

I think I can safely say that the Logical Language Group would be amenable to giving the Wikipedia permission to copy their text and redistribute it under the GFDL. Email webmaster@lojban.org and ask for permission. -Jay

As the President of the Logical Language Group, I have no trouble authorizing the use of this or any other text in Wikipedia. I will post to the LLG's board to make sure there are no objections. --John Cowan

Lojban is an artificial language, largely inspired by predicate logic. It was originally called Loglan by project founder James Cooke Brown, who started the language development in 1955. Loglan/Lojban has been built over four decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters, led since 1987 by The Logical Language Group.

Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers. Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication. It is designed to be culturally neutral, and thus to explore the validity of cultural relativism.

Lojban's grammar is based on the principles of predicate logic and it has an unambiguous, regular grammar; the rules of the language are without exception. It has phonetic spelling and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words. It is simple compared to [natural language]s; it is easy to learn. Its 1,300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.

Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific and from the theoretical to the practical.

.i ko gleki lenu tadni la lojban. po'u le logji bangu

(Have fun with studying Lojban, the logical language!)

Links:

http://www.lojban.org/

Lojban Wiki

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?LojbanLanguage

I'm learning Lojban so I can see the world in a different and hopefully better way. Given that I feel within 50 years computers will be advanced enough to translate any language to any other, I think all universal language projects are obsolete. But the subjective factor will never be obsoleted by technology. Language influences the way we see things, and I am hoping that fluency in such a clear and powerful language will give a new perspective on reality.

I don't think we are anywhere near decent machine translation, because what you would say in one language doesn't necessarily include enough information to express the same concept in another language. Take, for example, the Lojban {mi klama}. It could mean several things, depending on context. It could mean "I will go", it could mean "I went", or it could mean "I'm going". It would be clear to humans from context which is meant, but a computer would have to understand what is being talked about to be able to translate it to the English equivalent. --Bogtha 13:47, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Any discussion? --LMS

I'm a little confused on the topic of Lojban vs. Loglan. I think a comparison article or chart would be of very much help. Mkoval 22:11, 30 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wiki:Lojban vs Loglan comparison, look also at loglanic texts on www.loglan.org --ilya 06:51, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, I included the comparison link in the main text. It's not so easy to understand by someone with little backgroud, so I think a simple comparison in Wikipedia is still warranted. Mkoval 07:36, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I am in the process of writing a section on this. Expect it to be added during the next week. arj 21:18, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Done. arj 13:43, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Is there any need to start a Lojban edition of Wikipedia? Mkoval 22:11, 30 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think this will be done exactly when some significant amount of people will speak Lojban. We then

create computer words in Lojban
port here existing wikis and texts
port here archives of lojban@yahoogroups.com

ilya 06:51, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Meanwhile, documentation-happy Lojbanists can go to the Lojban wiki or the Lojban dictionary project. arj 17:11, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, I added the link to the Lojban dictionary to the main text. Mkoval 07:42, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Please, could you offer some longer text, in order to get a feel for Lojban? Maybe a well known text, like the Lords Prayer or the beginning of the Declaration of Independce of the USA, or something. Thanks. --denny vrandečić 01:02, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)

Lord's prayer in Lojban is on the Esperanto wiki. Other translations are at the official Lojban homepage. I don't think the latter is appropriate to add under the "External links" section, since the main page of the same site already appears there. arj 21:23, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Lojban words for parts of speech (brivla, gismu, cmavo, fu'ivla, etc.)

Pne, I agree that the wording you removed was a little awkward. But people who are not acquainted with Lojban will not know what gismu means. I'm tempted to just revert it, since the old information gives more information, but I suppose there might be a way to work in some info on what a gismu is earlier in the article. arj 21:51, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yes, well, I think the old information was inaccurate - the term brivla is defined in the article, but brivla in general don't have rafsi. I agree that keeping it in would provide information, but then the bit about "zero to three three-letter abbreviations" or whatever it was would need to be rephrased. -- pne 09:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've played around with the text a little; what do you think of it now? -- pne 10:10, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Are there any synonyms for these Lojban terms in mainstream linguistics? It always bothers me that Lojban grammar seems to be discussed in internal terms or in reference to English, but rarely with explicit reference to other languages.--Chris 17:33, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Lojban logo

A much nicer version is at: http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/pixra:Lojbancmalu.png

Kim Bruning 19:29, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Linking Lojban Pages

This is a technical problem regarding the Lojban Wikipedia, and I'll use the page Manatee to demonstrate. Normally, when one wants to link to a page in another language, the name of the other Wikipedia suffices. For instance, no:Manat is the code for the Norwegian version, and no.wikipedia.org is that Wikipedia's location. But for Taiwanese, minnan:Hái-gû is correct, even though the Taiwanese Wikipedia is at zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org. As you can see, jbo is not the correct code for Lojban, since the link appears at the bottom of the page rather than at the left. What is it, then?

My guess is that it is correct (it is the correct ISO code, after all), but that it has been disabled on en: because of political reasons, to discourage interwiki linking to jbo:. I believe the same thing happens at present with tlh: as well. arj 15:08, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"Like most languages with few speakers, Lojban lacks much of an associated body of literature." --I amended the complete negative, not out of vanity, but in the interest of historical accuracy. (I only wonder that it was necessary to remove the link i inserted; surely someone besides hardcore Lojbani might be interested.) --mrh aka maiky'elsym

alga

What's "alga"? I've never heard of this, or any other shorter-than-five-letters brivla.

I believe it means "alga". arj 18:53, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Vocabulary

There should be a more thorough section about how vocabulary was, is and will be created, because it would be interesting for the accidental viewer, just as for somebody wanting to compare it to other auxlangs and Euroclones.

(From http://neptune.spaceports.com/~words/lojban.html )

Constructed languages create words in two main ways. There are some, mainly fictional languages like Elvish or Klingon, which make up all the words from scratch. Most international languages, however, take their vocabulary from existing languages (in practice, European languages) and sometimes modify them to suit the spelling and grammar of the new language - Esperanto is a good example. Lojban falls half way between the two.

The root words (gismu in Lojban) were created by a computer from words in the six most widely-spoken languages in the world: Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. This is one of the advantages of Lojban - it doesn't give a privileged position to European languages. These are also languages that have had a lot of words in common other languages; for example, French and Italian share a lot of words with Spanish, and although Turkish is not on the list, I found in Lojban a lot of elements of Turkish which had come in from Arabic and Persian (which is quite close to Urdu). And of course English words like "television" and "taxi" have spread all over the world.

All root words have five letters. For example:

   * prenu - person
   * cukta - book
   * vanju - wine

Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has the "per" of English "person" and the ren of Chinese. cukta has the "ook" of English "book", all of Chinese shu(c is pronounced "sh"), and part of Arabic (and Turkish) kitap. vanju is like French vin and Chinese jiu. This makes learning words easier for the largest number of people.

(Arguably, this would make the vocabulary indiscriminately difficult for everybody, rather than being easier for people already familiar with Latin, English etc. It could be argued which approach would be the best in practice)

"... all the nuance and subtlety of the natural languages ..."

As a neophyte in this area, I may be stepping unknowingly into a well-worn controversy, but the following struck me immediately as potentially POV:

... an artificial language like Lojban, that is capable of expressing all the nuance and subtlety of the natural languages we are familiar with ...

I imagine many natural-language poets would contest this statement, since many poetic effects are based on deliberate ambiguity. If Lojban truly does achieve the goal of having "mathematically inviolate grammar and spelling rules [that] remove all possible confusion about what a sentence is trying to say," then it would seem to be incapable of ambiguity. Original Lojban poetry would lack the ability to use ambiguity as a communicative device. And (considering this in the abstract, since I've never attempted it) I would expect that much natural-language poetry could not be satisfactorily translated into Lojban.

The premise seems to be that ambiguity is inherently bad. It is certainly bad in some contexts, but in others it is powerful and evocative. --Sharpner 20:21, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it could be written in a more neutral way. We have to separate between grammatical (syntactical) unambiguity, as opposed to lexical/semantic vagueness. Lojban still has the latter, since it is not based on any rigiorous semantic framework. arj 22:37, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Excellent point, and one well-worth inclusion or working in somehow while restoring the NPOV. - Not a registered user.

automatic translation

MattisManzel 13:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC): Hi. I started community-wiki: multilingual experiment (lojban translation still missing btw). I recently got interested in a possibly precise inter-language for automatic translation into multiple natural languages. Lojban - I'm all new to it - seems most intesting for that. My recent utterings on the issue are on community-wiki: multilingual pages. Does someone know about relevant research, experimentation or communities? Seeing lojban's relation to automatic translation extended in the article wpuld be interesting. Thanks

Better brief examples available?

This is a minor issue, but it seems odd to me that while Lojban has the advantage of cultural neutrality as a language the small example chosen is The Lord's Prayer which is a piece heavily laden with cultural baggage and overtones. If at all possible it might make sense to choose some alternative small example which does not relate so directly to historical Christian dominance and the legacy of Colonialism. -- M0llusk 12:25, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure. There is a lot of tradition behind using the Lord's Prayer for comparison. The difficulty is perhaps that, because the passage is intended to be used for comparison, we want to use something that will be familiar to many readers in its English form. Consequently, anything we choose will tend to have cultural value in the English-speaking world, so it will not be culturally neutral. In case I ever wind up doing any Lojbanic translation sometime in the future, I'd be happy to entertain suggestions for what would make a good example. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 05:49, 21 May 2006 (UTC) (PS: Maybe something from Shakespeare? But that seems problematic because it's barely comprehensible to modern English speakers and it probably wasn't really very standard in its own day. Any kind of poetic work will be hard to translate. Maybe some other, more recent piece of well-known prose literature?)

I vote that we keep the Lord's Prayer. Claims that the Lord's Prayer, believed to have been taught by Jesus himself, are "baggage" and "legacy of colonialism" frankly sound a little vitriolic, as well as unfounded. ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 14:19, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Um, try reading that again. He didn't say that the Lord's Prayer was baggage, he said it was laden with cultural baggage. Surely you can agree with that?

I think the Lord's Prayer is unsuitable for the reason that it isn't representative of modern English. If there's going to be a comparison to an English text, it should at least be text that corresponds to how English is used today. Does the example really have to be something that is well known? Why not make something up and display the English and the Lojban side-by-side? --Bogtha 22:21, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

TLP is a nice demonstration of the universal applicability of Lojban, however, it is a liability for the project. One of the primary objectives at the present time is to get non-english speakers to learn the language. Unfortunately, christians have created a great deal of animosity outside Western countries (and even within them), so the presence of TLP on this site is more likely to put off potential target students by undermining the cultural neutrality of the site. In mitigation, if TLP only exists on the english Wikipedia page then it may go unnoticed; nonetheless, it is a threat that need not exist. Please remove it or take the curse off it by adding few quotes from the Koran (and perhaps Hindu writings or Buddhism).--Nihil86 08:01, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

As Nat Krause has stated, the Lord's Prayer is a prayer 1)said by a Jew, 2)whose influence started Christianity, and 3)who was born in a place that is now Palestine. Nothing to do with colonialism. In addition, Wikipedia does not care whether a sample is a liability for a project or not. The babel text is also often used in comparing languages and that would be a good example as well. There's no problem with adding other samples but the case to remove the lord's prayer just because hasn't been made. Mithridates 13:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and BTW I just remembered that the page on Ido (was made into a FA) used to have the Lord's prayer. I was the one that put it on but later replaced it with something else because the sound quality was better and the file was a longer one. That's fine and I never gave it a moment's thought. Had someone begun ranting about colonialism on the talk page it probably would have polarized a number of people though. I recommend you chill and just find some better sound files. I assume Lojban wants to appeal to both religious and non-religous people, so the best thing to do is stop talking about religion. Mithridates 13:26, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Would a better example be the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare? lojban.org has it in Lojban, followed by a fairly literal re-translation into English:

me le resprtestudine. e le cicyractu
.i lo resprtestudine kuce lo cicyractu leni sutra cu dabysnu
.isemu'ibo lego'i noi pu zanru jdice tu'a le detri .eji'a le stuzi cu sepli
bajra simjvi
.ilezu'u cicyractu noi ki'u leke'a rarna ka sutra cu na'e gunka jundi lenu
bajra ku'o ca'o lenu vreta te'e le dargu cu sipna
.i lezu'unai resprtestudine. noi sanji leke'a ka masno na sisti lenu bajra
.ije seki'ubo lego'i noi bajra zo'a le cicyractu noi sipna
cu mo'u klama le stuzi sa'a pe le cnemu befi lenu jinga
ni'o le se cusku cu se xu'apli fi ledu'u le rarna se ckaji noi na'e seke gunka
jundi ku'o le nu troci cu so'eroi se tervlimau

Tortoise and Hare. A tortoise and a hare argued on [their] speed. So, having
agreed on the date and the place, they ran [raced] apart. The hare, on the
one hand, who because of its natural speed did not take pains with its running,
lied down by the road and slept. The tortoise, on the other hand, being
aware of its slowness, did not stop running. And thus it, running past the
sleeping hare, arrived at the trophy of victory.
The word shows that natural quality which has not had pains taken over it is
often overpowered by effort.

A problem with this text, though (as well as most of the other short fables) is that it's in some fairly antiquated Lojban, with constructions that represent bad habits from English. It wouldn't be original research to fix it up, would it? rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 23:25, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I think that if you are capable of fixing it up, then you would necessarily be considered a qualified expert to do so. I don't think language ability counts as research as far as original research is concerned. But, if you want to make sure that angle is covered, you could post your reworked version to Lojban.org, which would then be an outside source. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 22:37, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

That could be okay. Is there a sound file for it too? Up to three examples would be ideal I think. I don't know if there's any music in Lojban but that would be good too. User:Mithridates

Context-free grammar?

The article Context-free_grammar states that Lojban's grammar is context-free. I would think that elidability of terminators possibly makes it context-sensitive. Icek 12:21, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Questions

Does Lojban have punctuation? -- Beland 16:57, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Done. Short answer: no. arj 17:55, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

When a letter has multiple possible pronounciations, is there a rule to pick one in a given circumstance, or are people free to pick one randomly? -- Beland 16:57, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Done. arj 17:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Can anyone graph a Lojban sentence for us? -- Beland 16:57, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Attitudinal indicators

The editor who suggested for attitudinal indicator to be merged in here didn't state a reason for doing so. Seeing as the tag has stood for months, and this article here is quite long already, I'm inclined to just remove the merge tag. Any opinions? arj 10:41, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

The only reason I can see to merge them is that the page on attitudinals is really short. Better, in my opinion, would be to mark it as a stub and not merge. --Vishahu 17:57, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

name derivation?

Does anyone know where the name "Lojban" comes from? If so, please add it to the article. —Steve Summit (talk) 13:41, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Adjectives and adverbs?

If the language has no adjectives or adverbs, then how do I indicate that my ideas are both colorless and green, and that they sleep furiously, as opposed to sleeping in some other fashion? --Carnildo 07:23, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

IMO the answer to this goes beyond the scope of an encyclopedia article. If someone wants to try to work it into the article, the relevant place in the reference grammar is Chapter 5, section 6. arj 09:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Perceived weaknesses in Lojban

Why is there several sounds?

I had high hopes for lojban and am quite disappointed by the fact it does not enforce one sound per letter. .a'o may by both "aho" (like bowl) or "ahɔ" (like hot) and still refer to the same thing (hope).

Also, it is not context-free, at least for the letters i and u.

Even some traditional languages such as Serbian (and most Slavic languages come close to it) enjoy univalence between phonemes and graphemes. Such a thing appears to me as fundamental for an ambitious (and non-ambiguous) language.

Any reason for this?
David Latapie (✒ | @) 15:12, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I do not understand the complain. Every language I know of has different pronunciations possible for many phonemes. If I understand lojban correctly, every letter has one corresponding sound and vice versa. The sound itself can be pronounced with different "accents" to accommodate speakers of widely different origins. 8 Jan 2007. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 195.212.29.75 (talk • contribs).

Usefulness of explicit glottal stop?

Also, wouldn't it be better to just decide there is no liaison in lojban? I am a French native speaker and we use the glottal stop exclusively to avoid liaison (like hérisson [leading glottal stop] vs. horreur [no leading glottal stop]). Consequently, I may misunderstand the function of the glottal stop; is it a sort of “syllable separator”? Please notify me of any other use for this “sound”.
David Latapie (✒ | @) 15:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for saying so, but you seem to be confused on a few fronts. Firstly, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of a talk page, which is to discuss how to improve the article. Even if everyone here were to agree with you that Lojban had the problems you perceive, that wouldn't really affect the article. Secondly, you seem to misunderstand the meaning of the term phoneme; Lojban does indeed have a one-to-one grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, [ɔ] and [o] being alternative realizations of the same phoneme. Thirdly, you seem to misunderstand the nature of the glottal stop; it is simply a consonant. In some languages, it can be inserted epenthetically; this is the case in French (well, most dialects), where it's inserted to produce hiatus when liaison is forbidden (especially before so-called h aspiré), as well as in English, where it appears phrase-initially if no other consonant is present. In other languages, it does not exist at all; I don't think Italian has glottal stops at all. And in yet others, it's simply a normal consonant. (As used in those languages, it might well sound like a "syllable separator" to a French or English speaker, but that's a consequence of how French and English use the sound, not something inherent in the sound.) —Ruakh_TALK 01:07, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Suggestions

A couple suggestions:

1- When describing a new language in a Wikipedia article written in English, do not describe the language in terms of words from the language itself. Example:

Etymology of the name

The name of the language, Lojban, is a combination of {loj} and {ban}, which are rafsi for {logji} and {bangu}, meaning "Logical" and "Language", respectively.

So what the heck is a rafsi? I'm sure it makes perfect sense to the author of the article, but those who are just getting started trying to learn about it, it's a little discouraging when the article starts off confusing. According to Wikipedia,

rafsi is a morphology term pertaining to artificial language Lojban.

(Not very helpful so far.)

In Lojban, all gismu and many cmavo have special forms, called rafsi, by combining which it is possible to create new selbri and names.

OK, this brings me to point #2

2- When defining a word from a new language in a Wikipedia article written in English, do not define the word using other words from this new language. For example:

I have a new language, Snospmis. The name Snonspmis comes from the kitu of pine trees. What is or are kitu you ask? Kitu are kind of like stolgib, only moreso xilften.

See?

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.184.121.215 (talk • contribs).

Agreed. —Ruakh_TALK 01:10, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Quite right. I clarified the passage on rafsi in this article, and a bit of work had already been done on rafsi.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 07:04, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Recreate Category:Lojban?

On 27 September 2006 I nominated Category:Lojban for deletion with the following reasoning:

Very small category with little hope for expansion. Currently has four entries (Attitudinal indicator, List of common phrases in constructed languages, Lojban, and Hartmut Pilch). Of these, I see only the articles Lojban and Attitudinal indicator as belonging in this category. Other articles discussing Lojban specifics are probably off-topic on wikipedia and better suited for the Lojban wiki.

There was little further discussion, Attitudinal indicator was merged back into Lojban, and the category was deleted on 4 October 2006. Now that we have separate pages on gismu, selbri, jbonunsla, and sumti I wonder if it would make sense to recreate the category. What do the other wikipedians think? —Tobias Bergemann 11:50, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't see what's wrong with having List of common phrases in constructed languages and Hartmut Pilch in a Category:Lojban if it exists. The former is probably Wikipedia's 2nd biggest source of information on Lojban, and the latter is a noted Lojbanist. However, I'm not sure we should whether we should have a category. Maybe we should just merge those articles into this one (jbonunsla for sure).—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 01:09, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Aargh, Common phrases in constructed languages was deleted. Thanks, Wikipedia! Luckily, I was able to salvage the relevant text from Citizendium and will add it back to this article.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 01:14, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

When I nominated the category for deletion Attitudinal indicator was already nominated for merging back into Lojban, and it wasn't clear to me that Hartmut Pilch is in fact a noted Lojbanist. All that the wikipedia page about Hartmut Pilch says about his relation to Lojban is: "He is also a student of Lojban, a constructed language." On his homepage at a2e.de he writes "I haven't progressed very far with Lojban yet, although it embodies much of my ideals of verbal communication."

I think a category for Lojban would make sense if there are more than, say, three or four separate articles about the language and the culture that surrounds it. —Tobias Bergemann 10:30, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I think for Category:Lojban to be re-created, we'd need at least five articles that are completely about Lojban (which we do — Lojban, gismu, selbri, jbonunsla, sumti, and rafsi is already six — though I'm not actually sure all of those deserve to be separate articles), at least ten articles that are very much connected to Lojban (the above plus Loglan make eight; are there others?), and an expectation that at least ten more worthwhile articles could be written that are completely about Lojban (preferably with a concrete list of ten redlinks that we think should become their own articles). If that's not the case, then Lojban's "See also" section should more than subsume Category:Lojban. —Ruakh_TALK 22:14, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't see 15 Lojban-specific articles happening any time soon. I agree with your idea that we should, at least, have a list of redlinks on hand for topics that would make good articles, before we proceed to re-create the category. It's interesting to note that the Chinese Wikipedia article on lojban has a separate article on Lojban grammar.

I think it's reasonable to include Lojbanists in Category:Lojban, if the category exists, and if the people have articles about them already. The only things I know about Hartmut Pilch are the things I learned from the Wall Street Journal article about him, which thought his interest in Lojban was interesting to include a short glossary of a few Lojban words alongside the article.

The current Loglan article is mostly about TLI Loglan; it might be offensive to add it a Lojban category.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 00:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

A programming language or a human language?

The first paragraph doesn't make this clear, IMO, to someone who has never heard of this before. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 220.237.169.187 (talk • contribs).

Pronouncing the comma

I've got the following from the on-line Reference Grammar, Chapter 3, Section 3, eighth paragraph:

"It is always legal to use the apostrophe (IPA [h]) sound in pronouncing a comma."

-- Dissident (Talk) 18:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Abstract noun marker

Anyone know if there's an abstract noun marker? Is nominalization possible in this language?

There are twelve abstractors. [1] arj 09:24, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

If by "nominalization" you mean "turning other parts of speech into a noun" the answer is "yes and no". There aren't really any nouns per se, but the gadri ("articles") do function to turn brivla into sumti arguments. Example: gerku means "...is a dog". "le gerku" = "the dog" 198.151.13.10 16:47, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

How do you say in Lojban, "Ron speaks fluent Lojban and he got laid last night" where "got laid" is in the dubiative mood?

"la ron certu le zu'o tavla fo lo lojbau kei gi'e pu selgle .iacu'i ca le nu prulamcte" (said without a trace of irony) 198.151.13.10 16:47, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Baseline inaccuracy

The claim that the Lojban freeze will expire in 2003 is outdated. The freeze period was effectively extended in 2002, see [2]. arj 20:18, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for telling me that. I corrected the date. --Mednak 16:18, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Splitting

I suggest to split the Grammar section from this article, leaving a summarized version of it. --Mednak 16:32, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I second that. It seems the article jumps directly into trying to teach someone Lojban, rather than just explaining the history/concept of it. Miggyb 19:17, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I have created a new page dedicated to Lojban grammar. --Mednak 00:59, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

I have summarized each section of Grammar in this article. We may of course keep further editing them; but as for some particular additional content please put it in the external Lojban grammar. --Mednak 11:16, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Number of gismu

There are 1342 canonical gismu.

I count 1436: http://www.lojban.org/publications/wordlists/gismu.txt has 1438 lines. Subtract one line for the header and one for the blank line at the end, and you have 1436. It looks to me that every single other line defines a gismu. - furrykef (Talk at me) 07:30, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

No, that list of gismu also includes cmavo if they have rafsi.—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 07:44, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, you're right. The document's name is misleading, then. - furrykef (Talk at me) 05:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

.ie—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 05:30, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Number of gismu