Lojban grammar

The grammar of Lojban is based on predicate logic. The majority of the grammar is borrowed from the prior "logical language" Loglan, and some of its features come from Láadan. The characteristic regularity, unambiguity, and versatility of Lojban grammar owes much to modern linguistics and computer programming—resources that were unavailable to the designers of earlier languages. Lojbanist Bob LeChevalier summarized one advantage of Lojban grammar as follows: "Lojban moves beyond the restrictions of European grammar. It overtly incorporates linguistic universals, building in what is needed to support the expressivity of the whole variety of natural languages, including non-European ones."

Lojban texts can be parsed just as texts in programming languages are by using formal grammars such as PEG, YACC, Backus–Naur form. There are several parsers available.

Lojban has 6 vowels and 21 consonants. The phonemes are commensurate with graphemes, which means Lojban has 27 letters (lerfu) each corresponding to a unique phoneme. Lojbanic graphemes can vary in mode; this article employs the Latin alphabet version, which is currently in the most common usage (see Orthography for more detail). The phonemes, on the other hand, are defined solely according to the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The tables below show typical realizations of sounds and the Latin alphabets in Lojban. In all cases except the rhotic consonant the first phoneme represents the preferred pronunciation, while the rest are the permitted variants intended to cover dissimilitude in pronunciation by speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.

Lojban has 16 diphthongs (a kind of sound which consists of a vowel plus a glide, always constituting a single syllable). The combinations <ai>, <au>, <ei> and <oi>, for instance, are all realized as the corresponding falling diphthongs. Triphthongs exist as combinations of a rising and a falling diphthong, e.g. <iau>.

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