Lojban is a constructed language based on predicate logic. It is the
public domain successor of the language Loglan, which Robert
A. Heinlein mentioned in his novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
being used as an intermidiate between natural language and computer
language, which made me curious to check it out.
I'm focussing on Lojban rather than its predecessor because Loglan is
copyrighted by its inventor, Dr. James Cooke Brown, and there are
restrictions on its use. Lojban also appears to have a much more
active community and web-presence, including a Wikipedia with over a
thousand articles.
* Orthography
** Letters
' , . a b c d e f g i j k l m n o p r s t u v x y z
** Unused Roman letters
h q w
** Capitals
Used to indicate non-standard stress in loan words.
* Phonology
** Vowels
- a as in f*a*ther
- e as in g*e*t
- i as in mach*i*ne
- o as in b*o*ld
- u as in tr*u*th
- y as in b*u*t (schwa)
** Dipthongs
- ai as in h*igh*
- au as in h*ow*
- ei as in h*ey*
- ia like German /Ja/
- ie like yeah
- ii like ye
- iu like you
- oi as in b*oy*
- ua as in *wa*ter
- ue as in q*ue*stion
- ui like we
- uo as in q*uo*te
- uu like woo
** Consonants
- c as in *sh*ip
- g as in *g*um
- j as in mea*s*ure
- x as in lo*ch*
