coi ba'e tornau

There are around 1,300 gismu (predicates) in Lojban. These were carefully selected to be equally influenced by (or distant from, if you prefer) the analogs in the six major natural languages. That is, there are very few blatant cognates, but each gismu should be slightly recognizable if you speak one of these languages. If you know English or Spanish, you can already read Esperanto. If you know English or Chinese, in contrast, Lojban will not seem to be entirely gibberish.

The pool of gismu was selected to broadly cover as much of human discourse as possible. Each is defined to be as general as possible. The goal is that the language evolve by combinatorially combining gismu to modify each other in precise ways, rather than introduce new gismu which have the potential to fracture the language.

This process of combinatoric modification comes about through tanru and lujvo. A tanru is, simply, two or more gismu placed together which modify each other according to strict rules of grammar in a manner almost identical to function composition. A melbi xanto is a "beautiful type of elephant" or a "beautiful elephant", never "elephantine beauty." To express "elephantine beauty", you say xanto melbi. Tanru allow for awesomely weird metaphors, most of which are accidental yet so striking that you record them for posterity. When you make errors in Lojban, they will often express such strikingly weird imagery that you cannot help but notice them immediately.

A lujvo is simply syntactic sugar for a tanru. You construct a lujvo by combining the elements of the gismu (rafsi) in precise ways. A rafsi is similar to a syllable in that it is a recognizable component of a gismu, yet differs in that each rafsi must uniquely correlate to a single gismu. In other words, it's a hash key. {'mel' => 'melbi', 'mle' => 'melbi', 'puk' => 'pluka' ...}

All lujvo follow the same modification rules as tanru, thus allowing you to form new words which have a syntactically unambiguous meaning. Semantically, they may sound more like Gary Busey on a robo trip (mlatu + xagji = latxagji = "a cat-like hunger"), but your audience will know unambiguously that you did not mean "hungry cat" or "a hungry kind of cat."

lujvo are the second most powerful components of Lojban. They provide awesomely powerful expressiveness, similar to macros in Lisp. You're building the language up (or down) to the abstraction you need.

The most powerful components of Lojban are cmavo. These are connective words, adding structure and specificity to the language. Cmavo express spaciotemporal relationships, emotional states, the epistemological status of prepositions, grammatical relations, the works. Without cmavo, Lojban is a castrated Tarzan strung up on LSD, capable of only expressing crude yet sometimes bizarre propositions. With cmavo, Lojban is capable of expressing any degree of complexity with regard to meta-level discourse, quirks of spacetime and epistemological parodoxes, or grammatical pedantry. Although there are fewer cmavo than there are gismu, mastering them is far harder: cmavo are the means by which Lojban makes explicit things which in natural languages are either implicit, or absent. It takes some time to get used to the notion of explicitly stating some aspect of your thought which previously you did not notice existed at all.