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Nearly-finished Lojban post + image Getty Ritter 9 years ago
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1 \meta{( "lojban-basics" "the basics of lojban" ("language") )}
2 Lojban is almost certainly one of the dorkiest things in existence. It's
3 nevertheless pretty interesting.
4
5 The obsession with constructing a \em{perfect language} is an old
6 one.\ref{lang}
7 \sidenote
8 {
9 There's a wonderful book about attempts to discover or
10 invent a perfect language—it's written by Umberto Eco
11 and called \em{La ricerca
12 della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea}, which was
13 translated into English as \em{The Search for the Perfect
14 Language}.
15 }
16 Languages like Hildegaard von Bingen's \em{Lingua Ignota} or
17 Jon Wilkins' \em{Real Chracter} are different approaches to
18 building a language which is somehow perfect or sublime.
19 Other constructed languages have attempted to be optimal in
20 some particular respect—for example, Esperanto and Volapük,
21 for example, being culturally
22 neutral languages\ref{snark}
23 \sidenote{At least, \em{nominally} culturally neutral.}
24 designed for international communication.
25 The Loglan language—a predecessor of Lojban—grew out of a
26 similar urge, but instead of being philosophically perfect
27 or internationally optimal, it was designed to be perfectly
28 grammatically logical and unambiguous.
29
30 What this means is sometimes misunderstood: the fact that
31 Loglan (or Lojban) is "logical" does not, for example, mean
32 that wordplay is impossible in the language, or that every
33 statement is perfectly precise. It does, however, mean that
34 a given statement \em{can be} perfectly precise. The grammar
35 of the language is unambiguous, which means there are no ambiguous
36 sentences like the English sentence, "John saw the man with the
37 binoculars", and indeed, the book that describes Loglan takes
38 great pleasure in giving a Loglan translation of every possible
39 interpretation of the English phrase, "the pretty little girls'
40 school." The structure of a given phrase is rigorously defined.
41 However, this doesn't mean (for example) that you can only say things
42 which are true, or unambiguous: you can still easily produce
43 nonsense phrases, or be \em{semantically} ambiguous, in much
44 the same way that you can form nonsense syllogisms or unclear
45 mathematical equations.
46
47 Over time, Loglan's designer—writer and sociologist James Cooke
48 Brown—attempted to enforce copyright over the language, which
49 led to part of the Loglan enthusiast community creating their own alternate
50 version of the language, unencumbered by copyright
51 claims. This language is, of course, Lojban.
52 The creators of this new language built up the
53 vocabulary by an algorithm which ingested and spat out roots from the
54 six most widely-spoken languages at the time, which resulted in
55 words which are very faintly similar to existing vocabulary but
56 only in the barest, most subtly evocative sense. The new language
57 also added new grammatical features on top of Loglan borrowed from
58 other sources.
59
60 In contrast to most natural languages, which develop around word
61 classes like nouns or verbs or adjectives, Lojban is primarily
62 concerned with \em{predicates}, which it calls \em{brivla}\ref{voc}.
63 \sidenote
64 {
65 Lojban reference material tends to quickly start using
66 exclusively Lojban words for grammatical concepts, which )
67 find is one of the most tedious and unfortunate parts of
68 the material. You very quickly come across sentences
69 like, "The \em{rafsi} of these \em{gismu} combine to form this
70 \em{bridi}," which is precise and convenient for avid learners,
71 but opaque and difficult for casual readers.
72 }
73 A \em{predicate} is a function which takes arguments
74 and produces either truth or falsehood: by convention,
75 we assume that an expression involving a predicate is expressed
76 in such a way that it results in truth.
77 We can express predicates in the same way we express most
78 mathematical functions: for example, we might
79 construct a predicate \\(\\textit\{is-a-cat\}\\) which takes
80 an entity and tells us whether or not is is a cat. The
81 following formula (using the \\(\\land\\) operator to represent
82 \em{and} and the \\(\\neg\\) operator to represent
83 \em{not}) expresses that Garfield is a cat while
84 Jon is not a cat:
85
86 $$
87 \\textit\{is-a-cat\}(\\textit\{garfield\})
88 \\land \\neg \\textit\{is-a-cat\}(\\textit\{jon\})
89 $$
90
91 We could also build up predicates that operate over multiple
92 arguments:
93 for example, we could use \\(\\textit\{sees\}(x, y)\\) to express that
94 \\(x\\) is looking at \\(y\\).
95
96 $$
97 \\textit\{sees\}(\\textit\{garfield\}, \\textit\{jon\})
98 $$
99
100 We can also combine ideas that share \em{variables} in order to
101 express more complicated concepts: for example, if we know that
102 Garfield is seeinga cat, but we don't have
103 a name for that particular cat, we can express that using
104 our mathematical notation as well by introducing a dummy
105 variable:
106
107 $$
108 \\textit\{sees\}(\\textit\{garfield\}, x) \\land
109 \\textit\{is-a-cat\}(x)
110 $$
111
112 The Lojban language builds off of predicate logic like this, but provides a
113 system for speaking these kind of formulae aloud. Instead of
114 \\(\\textit\{is-a-cat\}(\\textit\{that-thing\})\\), we use
115 the word \em{ta} to stand in for \\(\\textit\{that-thing\}\\),
116 and we express the predicate \\(\\textit\{is-a-cat\}\\) by
117 the word \em{mlatu}. So, we can express our sentence:
118
119 \blockquote{\em{\wd{ta|that} \wd{mlatu.|is-a-cat}}\br{}"That is a cat."}
120
121 We can also use proper nouns like "Garfield" or "Jon",
122 but Lojban insists that, for clarity, we explicitly indicate
123 which words are proper nouns: they must be preceeded
124 by the word \em{la}, must be spelled using Lojban's phonetic
125 conventions, and must end in a consonant. This ensures that
126 proper nouns are easily distinguishable from other classes of
127 words.\ref{who}
128 \sidenote
129 {
130 It is likely for this reason that nobody has attempted to translate
131 the works of Abbott and Costello into Lojban.
132 }
133
134 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
135 \wd{garfild|Garfield}
136 \wd{mlatu.|is-a-cat}}\br{}"Garfield is a cat."}
137
138 The arguments given to predicates are ordered, so for a
139 predicate of more than one argument, we can list the
140 arguments in the correct order. Using the Lojban predicate
141 \em{viska}, which is analogous to our
142 predicate \\(\\textit\{sees\}(x, y)\\):
143
144 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
145 \wd{garfild|Garfield}
146 \wd{viska|sees}
147 \wd{la|the-one-named}
148 \wd{djan.|Jon}}\br{}"Garfield sees Jon."}
149
150 What if we want to express something like,
151 "Garfield sees the cat," though? Well, we could say
152 something like
153
154 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
155 \wd{garfild|Garfield}
156 \wd{viska|sees}
157 \wd{ta.|that}
158 \wd{ta|that}
159 \wd{mlatu.|is-a-cat}}\br{}
160 "Garfield sees that thing. That thing is a cat."}
161
162 But even though it's logically similar to what we want to
163 express, it's awkward linguistically. To that end, Lojban
164 lets us turn a predicate into a "thing" using the article
165 \em{lo}, which means something like,
166 "The thing such that [a predicate] is true." Therefore,
167 the phrase \em{lo mlatu} means, "the thing such that it is
168 a cat," or more idiomatically, "the cat."
169
170 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
171 \wd{garfild|Garfield}
172 \wd{viska|sees}
173 \wd{lo|the-one-which}
174 \wd{mlatu.|is-a-cat}}\br{}"Garfield sees the cat."}
175
176 If we don't really care to specify some argument to some
177 predicate, we can supply it with the word \em{zo'e}, which
178 stands in for anything unspecified. Thus, we can translate
179 the more vague statement, "Garfield sees something," as
180
181 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
182 \wd{garfild|Garfield}
183 \wd{viska|sees}
184 \wd{zo'e.|something unspecified}}\br{} "Garfield sees something unspecified."}
185
186 If the word \em{zo'e} comes at the end of a sentence, we
187 can safely omit it; otherwise, predicates with a large number of
188 arguments would always end in a tedious string of \em{zo'e zo'e zo'e}.
189 In fact, I've already been doing this without mentioning it:
190 the predicate \em{mlatu} takes not one but two arguments—\em{x mlatu y}
191 means that \em{x} is a cat of species \em{y}—and
192 \em{viska} takes three arguments—\em{x viska y z} means
193 that \em{x} sees \em{y} in the condition \em{z}. Some
194 predicates take as many as \em{five} arguments:
195 for example, \em{klama}, according to the standard Lojban
196 predicate reference, means:
197
198 \blockquote
199 {
200 \em{x1} comes or goes to destination \em{x2}
201 from origin \em{x3} via route \em{x4} using means or vehicle \em{x5}
202 }
203
204 That means we can express the sentence, "Jon is coming," as:
205
206 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
207 \wd{djan|Jon}
208 \wd{klama|comes}
209 \wd{zo'e|[to somewhere unspecified]}
210 \wd{zo'e|[from somewhere unspecified]}
211 \wd{zo'e|[by an unspecified route]}
212 \wd{zo'e|[using an unspecified vehicle]}.}}
213
214 or, more concisely, as
215
216 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
217 \wd{djan|Jon}
218 \wd{klama|comes}.}}
219
220 We can also rearrange the order of arguments to a predicate:
221 the word \em{se} is used to swap the first two arguments to
222 a predicate, so that
223
224 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
225 \wd{garfild|Garfield}
226 \wd{viska|sees}
227 \wd{la|the-one-named}
228 \wd{djan|Jon}.}}
229
230 is identical in meaning\ref{emph}\sidenote{…although perhaps not in emphasis!} to
231
232 \blockquote{\em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
233 \wd{djan|Jon}
234 \wd{se viska|is seen by}
235 \wd{la|the-one-named}
236 \wd{garfild|Garfield}.}}
237
238 We can use those argument-swapping words with \em{lo}, as well:
239 \em{lo viska} means "the one seeing", while \em{lo se viska} means
240 "the one being seen." This is a convenient way of building up
241 a very large amount of vocabulary: from the five argument positions
242 of the word \em{klama}, we can derive five "nouns": \em{lo klama}
243 "the go-er", \em{lo se klama} "the destination", \em{lo te klama}
244 "the origin", \em{lo ve klama} "the route", and \em{lo xe klama}
245 "the means of transportation".
246
247 Now we have the grammar necessary to tell relatively basic
248 and banal children's stories:
249
250 \blockquote
251 {
252 \em{\wd{la|the-one-named}
253 \wd{djan|Jon}
254 \wd{viska|sees}
255 \wd{la|the-one-named}
256 \wd{garfild|Garfield}.
257 \wd{lo|that-which}
258 \wd{mlatu|is-a-cat}
259 \wd{ciska|eats}
260 \wd{la|the-one-named}
261 \wd{lazanias|lasagna}.}
262 "Jon sees Garfield. The cat eats the lasagna."
263 }
264
265 Lojban of course is more than just what I've introduced
266 above: tenses\ref{tense},
267 \sidenote
268 {
269 In fact, I've been acting as though these sentences are
270 in the present tense, but by default Lojban sentences
271 do not specify time at all: they could contextually
272 be interpreted as past, present, or future.
273 }
274 pronouns, compound clauses, and so forth. Lojban also
275 has a relatively large set of "discursives", which are
276 words used to structure conversations in a rich and
277 descriptive way, and several other interesting features.
278 But I've shown the three major components of the Lojban
279 language: proper nouns, structure words like
280 \em{lo} and \em{se}, and predicates, which are the principal
281 distinguishing feature of Lojban.
282
283 \center{\img{/static/garfield.png}}
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