Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/June 2012

Lojban (pronounced locally [ˈloʒban] ^ⓘ) is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic, succeeding the project of Loglan. The name "Lojban" is a combination of loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language), respectively.

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. In an interview in 2010 with the New York Times, Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, stated: "The constructed language with the most complete grammar is probably Lojban – a language created to reflect the principles of logic." The main 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. Find out more...