Lojban

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An artificial language, created to help study some aspects of linguistics.

Its main reasoning is the removal of uncertainty or vagarity from the language, hence making it, amongst other things, easily parsable by computers.

The website detailing the language can be found at http://www.lojban.org and includes downloadable publications on the purpose of the language and how to actually speak it.

To the best of my (Kazuhiko) knowledge the key to the language appears to be that a number of ideas or objects (arguments or "sumti") are tied together by a 'predicate relation' ("selbri").

As an example (taken from the manual), vecnu means sell and has four 'arguments'. It would commonly be used in the form...

: x1 cu vecnu x2 x3 x4

(cu is a seperator to dissociate the first argument from the predicate relation and can normally be left out)
The four arguments are, in order, the seller, the thing being sold, the buyer, the price. Understanding I to be "mi", you to be "do", this to be "ti" and "zo'e" to be used in the place of an argument we do not care about or want to specify and we have:

: mi cu vecnu ti do zo'e
: I sell this to you.

(ChrisHowlett) I've got a few spare weeks over the summer. I just might be insane. mi cilre zo'e la lojban. la lojban.for.byginers. pe la robin.tyrnyr. joi la nik.NIKolas.

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