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Welcome to Relojban

Relojban is an experimantal fork of Lojban, a constructed logical language.

What is Lojban?

Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language, with a long history. The predecessor of Lojban, Loglan, was started by Dr. James Cooke Brown around 1955 and was designed for linguistic research, with a grammar based on predicate logic as its main feature. Lojban was created in 1987 based on the earlier Loglan, with the intent to make the language more complete, usable, and freely available.

As described by the Lojban website:

• Lojban’s grammar is simpler than of most natural languages, but complex in its own unique way. Lojban is an experiment in thought, as well: its users aim to see how its unique language structures affect thought and understanding.
• Lojban allows the expression of tiny nuances in emotion, using words called attitudinals, which are essentially spoken emoticons.
• Lojban allows you to communicate concisely without unnecessary or undesired details. For example, you don’t have to always think of what tense (past, present or future) to use in a verb when it’s already clear from context.
• Lojban is machine parsable, which allows potential new explorations in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine translation.
• Lojban has a live community of speakers expanding its vocabulary day by day.
• Lojban is designed aiming at being neutral between cultures.

What is Relojban?

Relojban is an experimental derivative of Lojban, a testbed for exploring new directions for developing the language. One in particular is the idea of a more robust and refined codification of the grammar, in opposition to the fragmentation that currently afflicts Lojban. Relojban also attempts to set a consistent development model for the language, in the style of open source communities.

Relojban shares the same vision, the same grammatical structures and the same vocabulary of the parent language, while placing particular emphasis on a few specific aspects:

• Standardization. The Relojban project focuses on providing complete specifications of the language, suitable for unambiguos implementation through software parsers, and supporting an ecosystem of diverse software tools. It also makes an effort to provide and maintain reference implementations of the language specifications.

• Stability, but with the possibility of future evolution. At the current stage the Relojban language is open to a certain level of experimentation, but the project highly values the idea of long term stability and of a careful, planned approach in response to future pressure for change. However, even in the long term, the Relojban project does not envisage to ever reach a “final”, immutable state of the language. The objective is, on the contrary, to continuously allow refinements and adjustments, if warranted and justified, through well-defined processes.

For more information on the reasons that led to the fork, please see here.

Want to Know More?

If all this sounds interesting to you, take a look at the resources available on this website to understand how Relojban looks like, how you can learn it, and how you can participate in its development.