[6] The phonetic form of Lojban gismu (root words) was created algorithmically by searching for sound patterns in words with similar meanings in world languages and by weighting those sound patterns by the number of speakers of those languages.
This resulted in root words being in their phonetic form a relatively equal mixture of English and Mandarin, with lesser influences from the other four.
[7][8][9] Lojban also utilizes a set of evidential indicators adapted from the constructed language Láadan.
[12][13] Apart from the actual practice of the language, some members of the community and LLG have been endeavoring to create various aids for the learners.
[19] Like most languages with few speakers, Lojban lacks much of an associated body of literature and its creative extensions have not been fully realized (the true potential of its attitudinal system, for example, is considered unlikely to be drawn out until and unless children are raised entirely in a multi-cultural Lojban-speaking environment[20]).
Also such collective or encyclopedic sources of knowledge like the Lojban Wikipedia, which may help expand the language's lexical horizon, are not very well developed.
These available materials on the internet include both original works and translations of classic pieces in the field of natural languages, ranging from poetry, short story, novel, and academic writing.
Dan Parmenter: The removal of grammatical ambiguity from modification [...] seems to heighten creative exploration of word combination.
Lojban has a fully developed set of metalinguistic and emotional attitude indicators that supplant much of the baggage of aspect and mood found in natural languages, but most clearly separate indicative statements from the emotional communication associated with those statements.
The set of possible indicators is also large enough to provide specificity and clarity of emotions that is difficult in natural languages.John Cowan: There is a marker for "figurative speech" which would be used on "back stabber" and would signal "There is a culturally dependent construction here."
[33]There have been proposals[34][35][36][37][38][39] to use Lojban as an intermediate language in interlingual machine translation and knowledge representation.
Some of them have, apart from the preferred/standard sounds, permitted variants intended to cover dissimilitude in pronunciation by speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.
In principle, Lojban may be written in any orthographic system as long as it satisfies the required regularities and unambiguities.
Some of the reasons for such elasticity would be as follows: Some Lojbanists extend this principle of cultural neutrality and assert that Lojban should have its own alphabet.
Each of them has uniquely identifying properties, so that one can unambiguously recognize which word is of which part of speech in a string of the language.
[47][48] The language's grammatical structures are "defined by a set of rules that have been tested to be unambiguous using computers", which is in effect called the "machine grammar".
Such conjunction words take different forms depending on what they connect, another reason why the (standard) Lojbanic expressions are typically precise and clear.
Cortesi[50] has pointed out the lack of certain terms for mathematics and geometry (although this demand may now be disputed as the current set of Lojban vocabulary does actually allow speakers to express such notions as steradian (stero), trigonometric tangent (tanjo), multiplicative inverse (fa'i), matrix transpose (re'a) among a number of other kinds of operators or metric units).
Other instances which require speakers to construct noncanonical words: A translation of The North Wind and the Sun.
The difference with the Lojban remake of the root words was that the weighting was updated to reflect the actual numbers of speakers for the languages.
Some of its characteristics, including tones, phonotactics, expressions for masses vs sets, non-existence of metalinguistic negation, etc., received criticism.