welcome to the Conlang Critic,
the only show that's called "Conlang Critic"!
I'm jan Misali, the guy that puts white serif text on a black background,
and today we'll be starting off our show by looking at the Logical Language itself,
Lojban.
Lojban is a language that was created in 1987 by the Logical Language Group.
it was based on another Logical Language called Loglan,
which is notable for not being very good.
everything about Lojban is meant to be completely [structurally] unambiguous.
however, the question is,
is it even a good language?
well, today, we'll be taking a close look at Lojban to answer just that.
let's start off with the writing system.
like most conlangs, Lojban uses the Latin alphabet.
however, in order to make it easier to learn if you aren't familiar with the Latin alphabet already,
Lojban only uses minuscule letters,
and follows a strict one symbol per phoneme rule.
its phonemes are:
so right off the bat, we can see some interesting decisions.
one that really stands out is that the ' and . are used to represent glottal sounds.
the letter h is usually used for the glottal fricative,
and the glottal stop, when not represented with a ʔ,
is typically represented with an ',
so it's a bit strange that the Logical Language Group would decide not to follow tradition here,
especially since they aren't using the letter h for anything else.
outside of spelling, however, there's some really weird stuff going on with Lojban's inventory.
like, why is the ə phonemic?
while it is a very easy sound to make,
when trying to make it intentionally, most people end up saying something like
/a/ or /ʌ/ rather than /ə/,
especially if they speak a language that doesn't have a ə sound at all,
like Spanish or Arabic.
also, what's with the distinction between voiced alveolar and postalveolar fricatives?
that's not a very common thing at all.
I mean, sure, it's in English, but it isn't in
Mandarin, Spanish, or Hindustani, so that's already one and a half billion people
who won't even be able to accurately pronounce the name of this language.
Okay, let's move on to vocabulary.
Lojban's vocabulary is a priori,
which means its vocabulary isn't taken directly from natural languages.
however, its vocabulary is still based on natural languages.
each word in Lojban is meant to be the average sound of its equivalent in Lojban's source languages,
which are, in order of influence,
Chinese (they probably mean Mandarin),
English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic.
this is a pretty interesting idea, and it means that
if all of Lojban's source languages have a similar sounding word for something,
Lojban's word will be similar, too.
for example, the Lojban word for "mother" is "mamta".
which does, in fact, sound a lot like
without sounding too much like any of them in particular.
it's a pretty darn good way to internationali[z|s]e the vocabulary!
unfortunately for Lojban, the good stuff about its vocabulary ends there.
first of all, the Lojban word for forty two, one of the designated Funny Numbers™,
is "vore".
if you don't see why that's a problem, I envy your innocence.
more seriously, Lojban has this problem where some, but not all,
place names and language names are considered part of the normal vocabulary.
the thing is, Lojban has a specific algorithm for converting endonyms into Lojban compatible names,
so these canon names should just be the results of that algorithm,
but they're not.
see, most Lojban words need to either be CVCCV or CCVCV,
so that all basic words are the same length, and you never get more than two consonants in a row,
and you never get a word that ends in a consonant.
however, the names produced by Lojban's name making algorithm can be whatever length you want,
with pretty much whatever sequence of sounds you want,
as long as it ends with a consonant followed by a glottal stop,
and is proceeded with the word "la", marking it as a non Lojban word.
the canon names in Lojban's vocabulary, however, don't get labeled as non Lojban words,
which brings us back to the fact that some, but not all,
place names and language names are considered part of the normal vocabulary.
that means, among other things, that if and only if you don't speak
Bengali, Portuguese, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, Urdu,
or one of Lojabn's source languages,
then the name of your language gets marked as not a normal word.
outside of vocabulary and phonology, what makes a language really stand out is its grammar.
Lojban's grammar, as was already mentioned,
is meant to be completely [structurally] unambiguous.
it's based around predicate logic.
as a result, Lojban doesn't have any nouns or adjectives.
in fact, if you were to ask a Lojbanist, they'd tell you it doesn't have any verbs, either.
Lojban's parts of speech are called
brivla, cmavo, cmevla, and rafsi.
in practice, Lojban's parts of speech are verbs, particles, and interjections.
those interjections, by the way, are sometimes called "emotional indicators",
and, yes, they are exactly what they sound like.
Lojban has simple words for "I AM BEING SARCASTIC",
and "I AM TRYING TO BE FUNNY",
and even a pair of words that mean
"I'M ABOUT TO SAY SOMETHING THAT ISN'T IN LOJBAN"
and "DON'T WORRY I'M SPEAKING LOJBAN AGAIN NOW"
Lojban even has a word that means "I am speaking now",
which in the standard Lojban grammar is required to appear at the beginning of every sentence,
even though in practice it just appears, like, between sentences.
in an attempt to be [structurally] unambiguous, Lojban assumes that the person you're talking to doesn't know anything about how communication works.
I mean, even if you're talking to a computer, which is a situation Lojban is supposed to be optimized for,
that computer can still deduce that you're beginning to speak due to the fact that you are beginning to speak.
all of this put together means that Lojban isn't very much like any human language.
it feels more like a programming language, or a markup system.
but, that is what it's going for, right?
regardless, predicate logic alone doesn't work as a grammar.
nobody's brain works the way Lojban thinks brains work.
as a result, you end up with a misguided community that thinks that Lojban is something that it isn't.
this is the part of the episode where I'm supposed to give a score.
however, the system I've decided to use for Conlang Critic doesn't give conlangs numerical scores,
but instead ranks them.
of course, since this is the first conlang I've reviewed, I can't compare it to any others!
that in mind, Lojban is the current best conlang reviewed so far!