The Complete Lojban Language

by John Woldemar Cowan

The Complete Lojban Language is a complete description of the artificial language Lojban. It serves as a reference grammar for the language, offering an overview of the language, as well as linguistic details on every aspect of the language. This book serves as the standard defining the language design. Though this description may sound imposing, technical and formal, the book is written in a light, often humorous style that teaches the reader about the Lojban language, about logic, and about linguistics in general. Lojban is a version of Loglan , the artificial language project described in the June 1960 Scientific American article of that name. "Loglan" was also referred to by name in Robert Heinlein's classic novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , as well as in other novels. Loglan/Lojban is a language designed for several purposes, including linguistics research (especially involving a proposed test of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis), foreign language instruction, artificial intelligence research, machine translation and related human/computer interaction applications, and as a stimulating educational and entertaining mental exercise. A few people are interested in Lojban as a prospective international auxiliary language. An international community of aficionados has appeared, writing in and about the language, primarily on the Internet.

Genres: Language, Nonfiction, Reference, Linguistics

620 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

John Woldemar Cowan is an American programmer known for work with XML and Unicode. Cowan is an alumnus member of the Unicode Consortium and was an editor of the XML 1.1 specification. He is also the founder of the ConScript Unicode Registry, which is maintained by him and Michael Everson.

He is currently the chair of the working group defining the R7RS Large standard of the Scheme programming language.

Cowan has revised William Strunk's The Elements of Style (now in the public domain) and is also the author of a comprehensive reference grammar of the constructed language Lojban.

Reviews

[Alan Bu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting language, but it definitely needs a better typography. The grammar was very interesting though. Since it's non-fiction/reference, it doesn't have a theme.

[Vincent Broman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive and somewhat exhausting.
Lojban, the most popular variant of the Loglan language, is the fruit of a fascinating project in language design and experimentation. This grammar is indeed "complete" in that it covers not just the topics of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, word formation, and sentence syntax, that you expect, but also the morphology of names, borrowing words from other languages, expressing mathematics and logic verbally, formalizing verbal hesitations/edits/comments, as well as a large selection of exclamations. In addition he goes somewhat into the design decisions made in creating the language and future directions of development. Little reading matter in the language is supplied, other than one-line examples, but that can be found elsewhere.
This book is not where you turn to start to learn the language, but if you get at all serious with it, you eventually want this book. The Language Planning Committee has altered the language a bit since this publication came out, and they have promulgated improved definitions of many things, but this book is still not replaced by anything like it in completeness.