History
Lojban has a predecessor, Loglan, a language invented by James Cooke Brown in 1955 and developed by The Loglan Institute. Loglan was originally conceived as a means to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought (an assumption known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis).
As Brown started to claim his natural copyright on the language's components, restraint was laid on the community's activity. In order to circumvent such control, a group of people decided to initiate a separate project, departing from the lexical basis of Loglan and reinventing the whole vocabulary, which led to the current lexicon of Lojban. In effect they established in 1987 The Logical Language Group, based in Washington DC. They also won a trial over whether they could call their version of the language "Loglan".
Following the publication of The Complete Lojban Language, it was expected that "the documented lexicon would be baselined, and the combination of lexicon and reference grammar would be frozen for a minimum of 5 years while language usage grew." As scheduled, this period, which has officially been called the "freeze", expired in 2002. The speakers of Lojban are now free to construct new words and idioms, and decide where the language is heading.
Lojban still shares many of the characteristics of Loglan:
- It has a grammar that is based on predicate logic, designed to express complex logical constructs precisely.
- It has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling and grammar (although word derivation relies on arbitrary variant forms). This gives rise to high intelligibility for computer parsing.
- It is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
- It allows highly systematic learning and use, compared to most natural languages.
- It possesses an intricate system of indicators which effectively communicate contextual attitudes or emotions.
- It does not have simplicity as a design criterion.
Read more about this topic: Lojban
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