Lojban Dictionary

You might have been worried all this time, didn’t you? I’ve been busy with college, work and stuff. Nevertheless, I was working on a little project, related to Lojban. I created a dictionary, English-Lojban and Lojban-English.

For this, I used L^aT_eX (for more information, you can read this); I parsed a XML file exported from jbovlaste with a python script. You can download the book here (go ahead; it’s under Creative Commons, like this blog).

And the script is under GPL v3.0 You can download the code here.

I promise to keep learning Lojban as soon as I can!

My lojbanic name

As is explained in the first chapter of “Lojban for Beginners“, we have to “Lojbanise” names. It’s common to start learning how to introduce yourself in a language, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Names in lojban are called cmene (remember that c it’s pronounced like sh), and they have to follow some rules:

1. End in a consonant.
2. Followed by a pause (period).
3. It’s not permited to have the words la, lai or doi embedded in them.

Some names can be lojbanised without any changes. Unfortunately, it’s not my case; my name (either Leo or Leonardo) ends in a vowel and my surname (Molas) contains la in it. This isn’t really nice for me to change it, but it has to be done.

Capital letters aren’t used in lojban as in English or other languages. Usually, words in lojban are stressed on the last-but-one syllable; if a non-lojbanic word (like a name) is stressed in other syllable, you can capitalize it.

So, my name won’t start as usual with a capital letter. I wonder why this little difference. I think it’s because there is no more reason to use them, but to distinguish names from other words. Nevertheless, when we speak, we can’t “hear” them. In the other hand, Lojban stablishes that names end in consonants, and are followed by a pause; we actually can hear names with this.

From all this, I think my “names” would be:

• Leo: leos.
• Leonardo: leonardos.
• Leo Molas: leos.molys.

I don’t like how molys. sounds . (The y, called “schwa”, it’s an unstressed vowel, and sounds like the a in above.)

kribacr was the first one writing a comment in this blog (thank you so much! and thanks to xorxes and stela too!), and started it with the lojbanic sentence:

coi .li,o.molas. mi’e .kribacr.

At first, I didn’t understand it, but it’s clear that my name is there, and so is his. He might have written mine “li,o” because in English it is pronounced more like a /LEE-o/, but in Spanish is /LE-o/.

According to the Lojban dictionary (you can download the pdf here), coi is “hello” and mi’e is a kind “I am”; so, if I want to introduce myself, I’d say:

mi’e leos.molys.

– EDIT –

As many commented here, there is a new way (an unofficial one… yet) to “translate” names into lojban, without the ugly deformations.

I’ve stopped by the IRC channel (#lojban at the irc.freenode.net server — for the first time ) and I met some nice people willing to help (even myself that I’m far far far away from an “advanced” student).

As timos, lindar and xorxes commented here, starting the name with a pause (the dot “.”) solves the “la/lai/doi” problem (thanks to komfn at the IRC channel for this). Also, I can avoid putting an “s” after leo in .leos.molas. if I change the dot for a comma. As I would like to be called just Leo among friends, in Lojban I’d just be called .leos., so to keep it always that way, when I also say my family name, I would say .leos.molas. .

In conclusion, I’d like to introduce myself saying:

mi’e .leos.molas.

First lessons

First of all, I’m going to explain some other things about the blog.

• As I’m self-teaching me, I’m going to show my level of understanding by a series of avatars representing my current state. That’s the funny dog in the column right there =>. I’ll be creating the future states with their correspondent avatar, as I feel I’m evolving, and put all of them in a kind of time line in the Evolution page.

• I’m trying to establish empirically how much time is needed to learn lojban and speak more or less fluidly. It’s not going to be really accurate, because I obviously have other occupations.
  The timeline will start the 20th of January, as is the day I started.

• I’m and I’ll be using lots of information, texts and multimedia that I didn’t create (e.g. the funny i eat stuff dog), but that are in the public domain (e.g. Creative Commons). The authors only ask us to give them the attribution of their own work; I think it’s a more than a fair price.
  I did my share in the Attributions page. The rest of the things that aren’t there, are mine.

• This blog is under Creative Commons as well, so feel free to use whatever you want however you want, as long as you say it’s mine, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and maintain the work open in the same or similar licence .

Enough… let’s get down to work.

I started reading “What is lojban?“. In the first chapter, it shows the alphabet used; Roman letters and 3 symbols, which are:

' , . a b c d e f g i j k l m n o p r s t u v x y z

“The three symbols are not punctuation.” That’s odd…

The apostrophe represents a specific sound, similar to the English /h/.

The period is an optional reminder to the reader, representing a mandatory pause dictated by the rules of the language. Such pauses can be of any duration, and are part of the morphology, or word formation rules, and not the grammar.

The comma is used to indicate a syllable break within a word, generally one that is not obvious to the reader.

(This list is extracted from the book.)

Now is when we can see that this language has “phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words”.I’m not going to copy the list of letters and their spelling; you can find it in the book.

Right now, I’m having some troubles with the c, because I forget it’s actually more like a sh . The x it’s also troubling, but it’s just about punishing myself very hard when I mis-spell them .

Gathering material

As you may have realized, there isn’t much material to start learning lojban. So I’m going to gather as much as I can, and dump it here.

Most of it it’s the official page. However, I found a nice community around the language, and encouraging you to ask all you need.

In the introductory page, the LLG (Logical Language Group) invites us to ask them printed books, as well as to immerse in all the “collected Web and file archives [that] contain all information that we have in distributable form“. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Moreover, googling I found another pages with interesting links:

• http://jwodder.freeshell.org/lojban/tutci.html
• http://lojban.wikidot.com/links (this last one under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License)

From all this, I found really useful until now, the following books:

• I started reading “What is Lojban?“. It can be found on-line, you can purchase it, or download it (in PDF or other formats here)
• “Lojban for beginners“. This one is a softer one (and the one I’m reading right now). I found it here, and another version a little bit more beautiful here (they seem to be the same one). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

From the first one, I read some chapters. It is useful as a theoretical framework, but lacks of vocabulary and exercises to practice.

And that last two are what “Lojban for beginners” is all about. It isn’t really “serious“, and they say it’s an incomplete guide… but it’s a great place to start .

In the next post I’ll be talking about my progresses. I’m not going as fast as I’d like, but in part is because of this blog .