Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/May 2009

Lojban (IPA: [ˈloʒban]) is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic. Its predecessor is Loglan, the original logical language by James Cooke Brown.

Development of the language began in 1987 by The Logical Language Group (LLG), who intended to realize Loglan's purposes as well as further complement the language by making it more usable, and freely available (as indicated by its official full English name "Lojban: a realization of Loglan"). After a long initial period of debating and testing, the baseline was completed in 1998 with the publication of The Complete Lojban Language. The name "Lojban" is a combination of loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language), respectively.

The principal sources of its basic vocabulary were the six (at the time) most widely spoken languages: Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, chosen to reduce the unfamiliarity or strangeness of the root words to people of diverse linguistic backgrounds. The language has drawn on other constructed languages' components, a notable instance of which is Láadan's set of indicators. Also Toki Pona and Esperanto have mutuality with Lojban to some extent. Find out more...