Rules Of Lojban

A reaction to comments like "LojbanLanguage has a parser with 600 rules, but EsperantoLanguage provides a mere sixteen. How can LojbanLanguage be simpler?" Here's the LojbanLanguage answer to the RulesOfEsperanto.

Warning: Don't think that reading a list of rules is an effective way of LearningForeignLanguages. Lists like these are meant simply to describe the patterns of the language, and they'll only make sense with usage.

Yes, especially since this is intended to mock the EsperantoLanguage assertion that the 16 RulesOfEsperanto are the complete grammar, and if you memorize them and some vocab you speak the language. This is false. (Don't people read any more? It says those rules summarize the grammer. Maybe the use of the word "entire" could be removed for greater clarity. Nobody believes those rules are the full story, just a good overview and introduction for beginners.)

It can probably be agreed that such a list for EnglishLanguage could be measured in kilograms.

No, just three or four digits... in hexadecimal.

Rules for Lojban

The articles la, le, lo, li, and lu (zo, zoi, la'o, lo'u ...) are the name, non-veridical, veridical, numeral, and lojban-utterance (lojban single-word, non-lojban utterance, non-lojban name, erroneous-lojban utterance) articles, respectively. lai, lei, and loi are the mass articles and la'i, le'i, and lo'i are the set articles corresponding to the first three above. lo'e is the typical/average article, and le'e is the stereotypical article. None vary by number, case or sex.
sumti (arguments) assume the case of the sumti place they occupy. The place tags fa, fe, fi, fo, and fu may be used to explicitly state the place. Also, the case tags bai, bau, di'u, etc. may be used to specify the case.
Any selbri may modify any other selbri by position. Comparatives and Superlatives are formed by simple modification.
The digits are pa, re, ci, vo, mu, xa, ze, bi, so, and no (zero). pi is the decimal point. Numbers are formed by junction of the digits. li ... boi surround simple numbers as sumti. To mark the ordinal, the post-position moi is used; similarly mei for the collective. pi ... mei surrounds the fractional.
Anaphora: ko'a, ko'e, etc; mi, do, ko, ti, ta, tu, ri, ra, ru, zu'i, zo'e; possessives are formed by position or with prepositions pe, po, po'e.
Theselbri undergoes no change. The tense markers pu (past), ca (present), ba (future), vi, va, vu (space), etc. may be used with any selbri or within sumti.nu, ka,ni, etc. are the abstraction operators. For the imperative, use the anaphorum ko.
Every word is Pronounced asit is Spelt.
TheAccent is always on thesecond-last syllable (names maybe marked - by capitalization - for irregular stress).
lujvo are formed bysimple junctionof the gismu orrafsi, substituting or inserting y where appropriate.
naacts tonegate a bridi,and is never anintensifier.
Nonce le'avla are marked with le'aand a marker rafsi as appropriate, and should conform to Lojban orthography.

Unofficial (n+1)th rule: You're not allowed to talk about Lojban in any language using grammatical terms that a non-Lojban-speaker would understand.

This was obfuscated to highlight the assumptions in the RulesOfEsperanto - what's the 'accusative?' Would a non-westerner understand those?

Yes, unless (s)he speaks an ErgativeLanguage. -- Well, or an agglutinative language. The point is, thought, that those are the standard grammatical terms for those parts of speech, in both western languages and elsewhere. If you don't protest at terms like verb and article, then you shouldn't protest at those.

I've spoken English all my life, and I have trouble remembering case names and their meanings. Of course I protest.

: "Agglutinative"/"synthetic" and "ergative"/"accusative" are orthogonal terms. A language can be agglutinative and accusative (e.g. Esperanto), agglutinative and ergative (a certain Eskimo language whose name doesn't come to mind), synthetic and accusative (Latin, ancient Greek, maybe modern German), or synthetic and ergative (Basque, I think).

I'll concede that some parts of Lojban don't quite lend themselves to the terminology of languages. What it can't, I presume, could be described in logicians' terms, which might be understood by at least some of the programmers reading this Wiki. Besides, Japanese doesn't have terms like "accusative case" and yet it can be broken down into terms we can understand, like "past tense" and "direct object" etc...

I think we're saying the same thing. Japanese doesn't have an accusative case, English doesn't have an absolutive case, and Chinese doesn't have any cases at all, but the terms are still valid. I'd be surprised if Lojban had that much trouble describing itself in normal terms, it just doesn't seem like it's trying.

Don't anthropomorphize languages; they hate that. It is people who discuss Lojban that refuse to speak English, for the most part. It might just be part of LojbanistaniCulture that precision is more important than making outsiders comfortable with the language. I've read plenty of tutorials and articles out there that make Lojban make sense, but this isn't one of them. --NB In this case, it is simply (AS NOTED ABOVE) the answer to statements like "LojbanLanguage has a parser with 600 rules, but EsperantoLanguage provides a mere sixteen." It is NOT a tutorial for lojban neophytes. If it were, it would explain the ConfusingLojbanGrammaticalTerms.

On the other page it defines a selbri as a verb, and a lujvo as a compound word, so they are fairly easy to translate. Every term on RulesOfEsperanto is in English. What would it have hurt to do the same here? As far as I can tell, it would have only served to make the above more understandable. Instead it comes across like a self-congratulations for mixed Lojban-English speakers.

Actually, a selbri is not a verb, it is a relation or predicate. The simplest selbri is a gismu, i.e. one of the roughly 1300 Lojban 5-letter root-words. Any gismu can be a selbri, not just those that might be translated into English verbs. Also, a selbri need not even be a single word. Multiword selbri are called tanru. Lujvo are compound words, however not all compound lojban words are lujvo. Further, lujvo need not be compound from complete gismu but usually use special short forms of the gismu (known as rafsi). The reason "normal" English grammatical terms are not used for describing Lojban grammar is to get better precision. The English terms for concepts similar to these sometimes have meanings that the lojban words do not have (or the other way around). If the English terms would have been used, there would still have been a need to define their new meaning in the context of Lojban. Thus, the people who created Lojban chose to instead just borrow the existing Lojban terms for these concepts even while speaking English. Anyone that is interested can easily look up the meaning for those lojban words anyway. Just check the reference grammar: http://www.lojban.org/en/publications/reference_grammar/chapter2.html#s18. Maybe this comment should have been in ConfusingLojbanGrammaticalTerms instead if I had read that page earlier.

Anthropomorphizing languages is a good idea all around. In this case, though, I should have said the Lojban-speaking community, or at least some part of it.