The Complete Lojban Language
I would like to thank the following people for their detailed reviews, suggestions, comments, and early detection of my embarrassing errors in Lojban, logic, English, and cross-references: Nick Nicholas, Mark Shoulson, Veijo Vilva, Colin Fine, And Rosta, Jorge Llambias, Iain Alexander, Paulo S. L. M. Barreto, Robert J. Chassell, Gale Cowan, Karen Stein, Ivan Derzhanski, Jim Carter, Irene Gates, Bob LeChevalier, John Parks-Clifford (also known as “pc”), and Nora Tansky LeChevalier.
Nick Nicholas (NSN) would like to thank the following Lojbanists: Mark Shoulson, Veijo Vilva, Colin Fine, And Rosta, and Iain Alexander for their suggestions and comments; John Cowan, for his extensive comments, his exemplary trailblazing of Lojban grammar, and for solving the manskapi dilemma for NSN; Jorge Llambias, for his even more extensive comments, and for forcing NSN to think more than he was inclined to; Bob LeChevalier, for his skeptical overview of the issue, his encouragement, and for scouring all Lojban text his computer has been burdened with for lujvo; Nora Tansky LeChevalier, for writing the program converting old rafsi text to new rafsi text, and sparing NSN from embarrassing errors; and Jim Carter, for his dogged persistence in analyzing lujvo algorithmically, which inspired this research, and for first identifying the three lujvo classes.
Of course, the entire Loglan Project owes a considerable debt to James Cooke Brown as the language inventor, and also to several earlier contributors to the development of the language. Especially noteworthy are Doug Landauer, Jeff Prothero, Scott Layson, Jeff Taylor, and Bob McIvor. Final responsibility for the remaining errors and infelicities is solely mine.
1.6 Informal Bibliography
The founding document for the Loglan Project, of which this book is one of the products, is Loglan 1: A Logical Language by James Cooke Brown (4th ed. 1989, The Loglan Institute, Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A.). The language described therein is not Lojban, but is very close to it and may be considered an ancestral version. It is regrettably necessary to state that nothing in this book has been approved by Dr. Brown, and that the very existence of Lojban is disapproved of by him.
The logic of Lojban, such as it is, owes a good deal to the American philosopher W. v.O. Quine, especially Word and Object (1960, M.I.T. Press). Much of Quine's philosophical writings, especially on observation sentences, reads like a literal translation from Lojban.
The theory of negation expounded in Chapter 15 (p. 353) is derived from a reading of Laurence Horn's work A Natural History of Negation.
Of course, neither Brown nor Quine nor Horn is in any way responsible for the uses or misuses I have made of their works.
Depending on just when you are reading this book, there may be three other books about Lojban available: a textbook, a Lojban/English dictionary, and a book containing general information about Lojban. You can probably get these books, if they have been published, from the same place where you got this book. In addition, other books not yet foreseen may also exist.
1.7 Captions to Pictures
The following examples list the Lojban caption, with a translation, for the picture at the head of each chapter. If a chapter's picture has no caption, “(none)” is specified instead.
| Chapter 1 | coi .lojban. Greetings, O Lojban! coi rodo Greetings, all-of you |
| Chapter 2 | (none) |
| Chapter 3 | .i .ai .i .ai .o [a sequence of arbitrary Lojban words] |
| Chapter 4 | jbobliku Lojbanic-blocks |
| Chapter 5 | (none) |
