Cilce Jbobau1 is the name of my collection of proposals for a 3rd2 version of Lojban, though it will be more similar Lojban than Lojban was to Loglan. On this blog, I intend to cover prospective grammar and motivations, but everything is subject to change as the language develops.

Why ?

There are two major problems this tries to solve:

  • Competing, undocumented reforms

  • Lojban is fundamentally flawed

Reforms

It is a known and hotly debated fact of modern Lojban that there are a plethora of reforms with varying degrees of adoption. If you want to see my opinion on the matter, read https://jbobau.org. Unfortunately, their inconsistency and poor documentation make the language difficult to learn. I want to create a new baseline that incorporates the most popular reforms and some new ones into a cohesive new version and then document them well.

Fixing Flaws

Lojban is not a logical language. It is not possible to translate an arbitrary Lojbanic phrase into predicate logic. Lojban is only logical in aspiration and aesthetic. It is merely inspired by logic. The most glaring example of this is that the Lojban reference grammar3 contains no logical formulae.

Cilce Jbobau is going to be built ground up to translate directly into some logical model4. We will heavily borrow from formal semantics where appropriate as inspired by Toaq5, but Lojban is sufficiently alien that we will have to occasionally diverge. Also, we wish to expose the underlying logic in a way natural languages do not as a feature of the language.

Overall Approach

We are going to build expressions into a typed lambda calculus over a second order predicate logic. Every grammatical production will evaluate some expression from its constituents' types.. This is roughly X-Bar, but we differ in some crucial ways, e.g. S-trees instead of strictly binary trees.

The semantics is build around clauses constraining an event parameter that is passed to all nouns, verbs, and subordinate clauses. As with all lojbau, verbs are predicates and nouns are (in some sense) arguments to those predicates. How exactly we connect these together will be left for later posts.

Not Found Here

What you will not find here:

  • A complete lexicon

  • A formal grammar

These will be built, and when they are, I'll post when they're released or receive major updates.

Lexicon

A full lexicon is too large, and will require building a separate tool to manage it. We will, however discuss broad lexical principles such as how words are made, what they mean, and changes being made to certain classes of words to make the language more consistent. We may also study specific common or technical words that require more elaboration. Most words will not be addressed here, however.

Formal Grammar

We will discuss elements of grammar and discuss fragments of formal grammar, but writing a full grammar will be debugged and written later. I do not want to distract myself with the details of writing a parser at the moment.

A core concept however is that the grammar will be modular. First of all, grammatical class of each word will be annotated by the lexer and loaded from a dictionary. Further, certain pieces of the grammar will be designated as extension points where you can add a new piece of grammar. For example, a new piece of grammar can make a sumti or selbri.

Anticipated Questions

Is this supposed to be the new Lojban ?

No. Maybe ? I do not want to force anything on the community. This is a gift to Lojbanistan and the conlanging community in general, and like any gift, it can be rejected. My hope is to make a language of sufficient quality that lojbanists will want to adopt it.

Even then, this would not be its final form. This is a cohesive vision for a new version of Lojban, but it's more of a starting point for an actual new version. I expect and invite major revisions to this language before the community adopts it.

Why aren't you in the community any more ?

I may return. I found developing with the community tended to drag me into community drama and distract from what I felt was important. Once I have a basic scaffold for all the major components, I anticipate returning and look forward to the opportunity to have more cogent discussions.

Why is it called "cilce jbobau"

Because it's wild, baby 😎6