The Complete Lojban Language
relationship. In formal logic this whole structure is called a “predication”; in Lojban it is called a bridi, and the central part of speech is the selbri. Logicians refer to the things thus related as “arguments”, while Lojbanists call them sumti. These Lojban terms will be used for the rest of the book.
In a relationship, there are a definite number of things being related. In English, for example, “give” has three places: the donor, the recipient and the gift. For example:
- Example 2.4
- John gives Sam the book.
and
- Example 2.5
- Sam gives John the book.
mean two different things because the relative positions of “John” and “Sam” have been switched. Further,
- Example 2.6
- The book gives John Sam.
seems strange to us merely because the places are being filled by unorthodox arguments. The relationship expressed by “give” has not changed.
In Lojban, each selbri has a specified number and type of arguments, known collectively as its “place structure”. The simplest kind of selbri consists of a single root word, called a gismu, and the definition in a dictionary gives the place structure explicitly. The primary task of constructing a Lojban sentence, after choosing the relationship itself, is deciding what you will use to fill in the sumti places.
This book uses the Lojban terms bridi, sumti, and selbri, because it is best to come to understand them independently of the English associations of the corresponding words, which are only roughly similar in meaning anyhow.
The Lojban examples in this chapter (but not in the rest of the book) use boldface (as well as the usual italics) for selbri, to help you to tell them apart.
2.2 Pronunciation
Detailed pronunciation and spelling rules are given in Chapter 3 (p. 33), but what follows will keep the reader from going too far astray while digesting this chapter.
Lojban has six recognized vowels: a, e, i, o, u and y. The first five are roughly pronounced as a as in “father”, e as in “let”, i as in “machine”, o as in “dome” and u as in “flute”. y is pronounced as the sound called “schwa”, that is, as the unstressed “a” as in “about” or “around”.
Twelve consonants in Lojban are pronounced more or less as their counterparts are in English: b, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, r, t, v and z. The letter c, on the other hand is pronounced as the “sh” in “hush”, while j is its voiced counterpart, the sound of the “s” in “pleasure”. g is always pronounced as it is in “gift”,
