nemorathwald | Lojban 20th Anniversary (Reply)

In 1987, Lojban was introduced as, essentially, an open source version of Loglan. The logical language project which began in 1955 was opened to its community to develop as The Logical Language Group so that it would not be in the control of only one man. A few months later, Lojbab and Nora were married with vows in Lojban. For reasons of Loglan's copyright, the root words were completely re-derived from English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic using computer algorithms by the end of the year, and the grammar was extensively debugged to fit the unmet desires of the community. The language was unveiled in January 1988, at the EveCon science fiction convention.

After Lojban successfully defended itself from a legal challenge over ownership of the concept of a logical language, its prototype Loglan faded into stagnant oblivion. Over the past twenty years the growth of the Lojban language and its community has proceeded in fits and starts. But if one looks at those intervals as iterations of a cellular automata, it could be interpreted as trending toward an explosion of growth.

2006 was a banner year for Lojban, seeing the biggest in-person meeting of enthusiasts, the largest-ever local groups meeting regularly in Michigan, Grinnell college in Iowa, and the Maine School of Science and Mathematics; a slate of exciting web applications; an original novel; plans for Lojbanimation which could become virally popular among non-Lojban speakers; and the peak of organized internet activity.

This year each of those milestones will only get bigger. This year we celebrate what Lojbab and Nora LeChevalier, Garry Burgess and Tommy Whitlock did in 1987. Think of that as an Arecibo message. Those take a long time to reach their destination, and just as long to answer, and they have been patient. This year we answer that message.

--Matt Arnold, aka "Eppcott"
Board Director, Logical Language Group