The Crash Course (pre-alpha)

The simplest sentence

lo mlatu a cat / cats	pinxe drinks, to drink	lo ladru milk
lo plise an apple / apples	prami loves	karce ... is a car
carvi ... is rain

Now let's turn to constructing our first sentences in Lojban.

One of your first thoughts might be "Where are nouns and verbs in Lojban?"

Here are three verbs:

pinxe drinks, to drink.

mlatu is a cat, are cats, to be a cat.

ladru is some milk.

To turn a verb into a noun we put a short word lo in front of it: lo mlatu, lo ladru.

It might sound strange how cat and milk can be verbs but in fact this makes Lojban very simple:

verb	noun
pinxe - to drink	lo pinxe - drinkers
mlatu - are cats, is a cat	lo mlatu - cats
ladru - is some milk	lo ladru - milk

We can also say that lo creates a noun from a verb with roughly the meaning of those who do... (drink - drinkers), those who are... (are cats - cats) or one which is... (is some milk - milk).

The most basic sentence in Lojban consists of one phrase otherwise called clause. Clause has the following parts from the left to the right:

• the head of the clause: one or more nouns. The noun lo mlatu in this case.
• the head separator cu (remember that c is pronounced as sh)
• the tail of the clause: the main verb (pinxe) with possibly one or more nouns after it: the noun lo ladru in this case.

One more example:

Here, lo plise means apples, kukte means to be tasty.

A simpler clause in Lojban would contain only one main verb:

You could say this when you see a car coming. Here the context would be clear enough that there is a car somewhere around and probably it's dangerous.

karce itself is a verb meaning is a car, to be a car.

Similarly, you can say

where

carvi is rain, to be raining

or

where

pluka to be pleasant

Notice that in Lojban there is no need in the word it in such sense. You just use the verb you need.

where

prami to love (someone)

where

bajra to run.

Again context would probably tell who loves whom and who runs.

Lojban does not require any punctuation, separate words are used instead. Punctuation marks like ! ? " " can be used for stylistic purposes or to make the text look smarter. They don't add or change the meaning. Note that the symbol . (dot) can be used as we use dot in English (i.e. as a punctuation mark) but its main purpose in Lojban is that it is a proper letter that denotes a pause.