what is This Lojban Thing
What is This Lojban Thing? (version 1.0.7 2008-12-31)
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An online version of the presentation What is This Lojban Thing? is now available at [1]. Offers to mirror the presentation (approx. 60 MB) are welcome.
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This CD-ROM/ZIP archive/web page contains a slide show on the
constructed language known as Lojban ([2]).
The presentation consists of a brief overview of the language's
history, its grammar, its semantics, its relation to the predicate
calculus, and a glimpse of the current Lojban culture. The
presentation includes various multimedia content, including the
official LLG parser, two Lojban speech synthesizers, Lojban music, a
radio show in the Lojban language, and links to other online
interactive content (such as an online Lojban-to-English translator,
a Lojban news site, and the #lojban IRC channel). Presentation of
this slide show can be expected to take between two and three hours.
For those interested in learning to speak/read/write in Lojban, this
disk should contain all the information you need to get started
learning and become conversational in the Lojban language.
System Requirements
The presentation format is simply a web page (lojban-thing-*.html)
utilizing the S5 ([3]) slide show
system and should work with any recent standards-compliant web
browser. To navigate the slide show, just use the arrow keys on your
keyboard, or press the space bar to advance to the next slide. A
connection to the Internet is suggested, but not required.
Some of the multimedia content (such as the speech synthesizers)
require free software to run (both synthesizers require festival).
All of these programs should be available to Windows users for free
online, and pre-packaged versions of these programs are available in
several popular GNU/Linux distributions.
For use of the computer-generated vocabulary tracks, a portable MP3
player, CD player, or similar device is recommended but not required.
Feedback on this presentation is always welcome. Send your comments,
corrections, praise, complaints, or other e-love to the appropriate
address listed in the slide entitled "Contact Information".
Discover and Enjoy!
David Montenegro
About Lojban
Lojban (ISO 639 language code "jbo") is a expressive,
culture-neutral constructed spoken language with an unambiguous
grammar, morphology, phonology, and orthography. (This basically
means that, when spoken or written, it can only be interpereted in
one way.) Lojban, a member of the Loglan family of languages
invented by Dr. James Cooke Brown in the latter half of the 1950's,
has been developed and maintained by the Logical Language Group
since its creation in 1987.
The sounds, grammar, and semantics of Lojban were chosen from among
languages all over the world. Due to its culture-neutrality,
Lojban has the potential to become an international auxiliary
language. Because its grammar is flexible and unambiguous, Lojban
permits the expression of ideas which are difficult to express
(clearly) in natural languages (such as English). Thus, it is
speculated that Lojban may also help to free the human mind's
creative processes and promote undistorted communication between
individuals. Because Lojban has a machine-parsable grammar, Lojban
is nearly ideal for computerized language processing. And, for all
of these reasons, Lojban is a powerful tool for use in research
linguistics. (Perhaps the most notable of Lojban's potential
research applications is in testing of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.)
For more information about Lojban, e-mail [email protected], visit
[4] or write to: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane Fairfax, VA 22031 U.S.A. (+1 703) 385-0273.