There are several crucial differences between

Lojban Lojban (pronounced ) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambigious. It succeeds the Loglan project. The Logical Language Group (LLG) began developing Lojban in 1987. ...

and

Loglan Loglan is a logical constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr. James Cooke Brown with the goal of making ...

, two logical constructed languages. The main one is of the sounding of the core words, which, however, have similar phonotactics in both languages. Most grammatical particles also sound differently. Lojban alphabet lacks the letters ''q'', ''w'', ''h'', but has the letter ''x'' and ' (

apostrophe The apostrophe ( or ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one o ...

) (the last two absent in Loglan).

History

James Cooke Brown James Cooke Brown (July 21, 1921 – February 13, 2000) was an American sociologist and science fiction author. He is notable for creating the artificial language Loglan and for designing the Parker Brothers board game ''Careers''. Brown's nove ...

called his language ''

'', and The Loglan Institute (TLI), the organization that he established, continues to call its language Loglan. The Logical Language Group called their project "Lojban: A Realization of Loglan" and considers Lojban a version of Loglan. Therefore, it is necessary to state that this page uses the term ''Loglan'' specifically to the TLI language, instead of the entire family of languages.

Lexicon

The principal difference between Lojban and Loglan is one of lexicon. A Washington DC splinter group, which later formed The Logical Language Group, LLG, decided in 1986 to remake the entire vocabulary of Loglan in order to evade Dr. Brown's claim of copyright to the language. After a lengthy battle in court, his claim to copyright was ruled invalid. But by then, the new vocabulary was already cemented as a part of the new language, which was called ''Lojban: A realization of Loglan'' by its supporters. The closed set of five-letter words was the first part of the vocabulary to be remade. The words for Lojban were made by the same principles as those for Loglan; that is, candidate forms were chosen according to how many sounds they had in common with their equivalent in some of the most commonly spoken languages on Earth, which was then multiplied by the number of speakers of the languages with which the words had letters in common. The difference with the Lojban remake of the root words was that the weighting was updated to reflect the actual numbers of speakers for the languages. This resulted in word forms that had fewer sounds taken from English, and more sounds taken from Chinese. For instance, the Loglan word ''norma'' is equivalent to the Lojban word ' (cf.

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

常,

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

''cháng''), both meaning "normal". However, a significant number of Lojban words remain the same as their Loglan counterparts, and it is possible to construct entire sentences with the exact same meaning and pronunciation between the two languages: for instance, "i ai mi nenri le midju pe le condi dertu" ("I intend to be in the middle of the deep dirt"). Grammatical particles were gradually added to Lojban as the grammatical description of the language was made.

Grammar

Loglan and Lojban still have essentially the same grammars, and most of what can be said in the short description of the Lojban grammar holds true for Loglan as well. Most simple, declarative sentences could be translated word by word between the two languages; but the grammars differ in the details, and in their formal foundations. The grammar of Lojban is defined mostly in the language definition formalism Parsing Expression Grammar and

YACC Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a Look Ahead Left-to-Right Rightmost Derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a com ...

, with a few formal "pre-processing" rules. Loglan also has a machine grammar, but it is not definitive; it is based on a relatively small corpus of sentences that has remained unchanged through the decades, which takes precedence in case of a discrepancy. The baselining of Lojban grammar may give it an advantage compared to Loglan in applying the language to practical uses.

Terminology

There are also many differences in the terminology used in English to talk about the two languages. In his writings, Brown used many terms based on English, Latin and Greek, some of which were already established with a slightly different meaning. On the other hand, the Lojban camp freely borrowed grammatical terms from Lojban itself. For example, what linguists call ''roots'' or ''

root word A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the prima ...

s'', Loglanists call ''primitives'' or ''prims'', and Lojbanists call '. The ''lexeme'' of Loglan and ' of Lojban have nothing to do with the linguistic meaning of ''

lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...

''. It is a kind of

part of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...

, a subdivision of the set of grammatical words, or particles, which loglanists call ''little words'' and lojbanists '. Loglan and Lojban have a grammatical construct called ''metaphor'' and ''tanru'', respectively; this is not really a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

, but a kind of modifier-modificand relationship, similar to that of a

noun adjunct In grammar, a noun adjunct, attributive noun, qualifying noun, noun (pre)modifier, or apposite noun is an optional noun that grammatical modifier, modifies another noun; functioning similarly to an adjective, it is, more specifically, a noun funct ...

and noun. A borrowed word in Loglan is simply called a ''borrowing''; but in English discussions of Lojban, the Lojban word ' is used. This is probably because in Lojban, unlike Loglan, a certain set of CV templates is reserved for borrowed words.

Phonology

In the new phonology for Lojban, the consonant ''q'' and the vowel ''w'' were removed, and the consonant ''h'' was replaced by ''x''. The consonant ' (

) was added with the value of in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

, but its distribution is such that it can appear only intervocally, and in discussions of the

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

and phonotactics, it is described not as a proper consonant, but a "voiceless glide". (This phoneme is realized as �by some speakers.) A rigid phonotactical system was made for Lojban, but Loglan does not seem to have had such a system.

References

External links

Comparison of features
in the

Conlang Atlas of Language Structures A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...

{{Constructed languages Lojban Comparison of constructed languages