mungojelly

.u'i

.i mi pu viska le pixra .i xu do pu finti .i sa'e xu do pu setca lo'u{ ko co'e }le'u .i mi sruma po le pixra cu pagbu lo zma'anga .i cinmo jarco zdile

I've been speaking Lojban for a quarter century I guess. At first I went away a lot but I kept coming back and eventually became more fluent. Lojban is a beautiful language and I fell in love with it. But also in what I know about myself, it fits what's important to me about conlanging. I enjoy making up sounds and grammars, but not enough that it'd drive me to bother to make a whole language for myself. The things I most like about language are in the deep complexities of semantics, I like the way meanings can have so much inside them, they seem magical and powerful to me, so I like to play with meaning. And also there's even more richness to how meanings are shared in a community, that gives them a special deeper richness, and it's interesting to me how people use different meanings, and like how the meaning exists in the space between people.

Lojban is only half finished, since it means to be a full modern language with words for all sorts of modern technical specific things and it only has like half of them really. It's an old complicated living project, that we're also building from the inside out as we speak it. A lot of people who have gotten fluent in Lojban have felt really frustrated by how the language and also its culture and internal politics are half-formed, but to me that's one of the most appealing things about it. It's been really rewarding to me to see people use words that I invent or popularize, it's amazing to be part of such a large complicated project with so much room for real creativity and exploration.

Thanks for providing this forum! People who speak conlangs (other than Esperanto) fluently is a very small group of people all included, let alone for each language, so it makes sense we'd start to communicate more about what we have in common even though the conlangs we speak are so different from one another. :)

In recent years I've started to describe Lojban has having "verbs" rather than using special jargon. Every language's "verbs" are special somehow, right?! So I don't think Lojban needs to have its own special terms in English.

But using an ordinary word for Lojban's verbs doesn't make it simple to explain Lojban's grammar. The basic way it works is that everything's a verb, almost all of the content of what you're talking about is in the verbs. Rather than a separate category of nouns, you just use a particle to nominalize verbs. Rather than adjectives or adverbs, you use a serial verb construction to add detail to a verb using other verbs. So all there is is verbs and various particles for transforming them into everything else you need.

It's possible to speak Lojban with a pretty simple grammar, where you just have a nominalizing particle or two and perhaps some particles that let you rearrange the order of the nouns, and then you can make verbs into nouns and use them with other verbs and you're good to go. In practice though fluent Lojban is considerably more ornate, with lots of particles that do things like quotation, dereferencing, writing more complicated descriptions of nouns, parentheticals, topic-comment style sentences, adverbial phrases, prepositional phrases, lots of really specific forms of anaphora, etc., etc., including particles that are experiments or jokes or that we pretend can do impossible magical things.

Lojban has a very inventive culture and grammar is one of the main things we like to play around inventing, so it's not possible to give a comprehensive list of every grammar that's ever been invented for Lojban. Many of them are just experiments that are mostly forgotten after the conversation where they're explored. But the fluent Lojbanists have a long memory for who might remember about particular weird old grammars and so we'll bring them back out as examples or to play around with them for fun.

If you think of some bizarre idea for how Lojban's grammar could be tweaked, then probably some fluent Lojbanist will respond, "oh yeah we thought of that years ago, I think we called it {xei'oi'i}!" :D So literally Lojban has just about every grammar it could possibly have, every grammar you could easily think of that fits with how its grammar's shaped, though the vast majority of those grammars are very obscure and the way we speak conversationally is really quite simple.