First Steps in Lojban

Wait, we never actually talked about stress. I was just guessing that it falls on the second-to-last syllable.

Oh? And what led you to that conclusion?

I told you, it was a guess!

Sure it wasn't a "cheat sheet" guess?

I swear, no cheat sheets! Forgive me! 🙏🥺

Anyway, Sora is right. In Lojban, you generally stress the second-to-last syllable of every word.

(Wow, just ignored me...) See? A woman's intuition is never wrong.

In practice stress rules differ a bit by part of speech — so let’s cover parts of speech while we’re at it.

In Lojban, "part of speech" is tied directly to morphology (the shape of the word). You can usually tell what kind of word it is just by looking at the spelling:

• brivla ("content word" or predicate): Ignoring ' and y, these have a consonant cluster in the first five letters and always end in a vowel.
• cmavo ("structure word" or particle): These have no consonant clusters and no internal consonants (unless it's at the very beginning), and always end in a vowel.
• cmevla (name word): The name-shaped tokens that follow la—they always end in a consonant, and in modern Lojban we usually wrap them in dots (e.g., .soran.). This is a word shape, not the same thing as the predicate cmene (“x₁ is the name of x₂”), which is a separate content word you’ll see in phrases like zo .soran. cmene mi (Lesson 7).

Just remember that the apostrophe (the h sound) doesn't count as a "consonant" for these rules.

Here’s a quick decision tree to keep it straight:

1. Does the word end in a consonant? → treat it as cmevla (a name word; in modern usage usually wrapped in dots).
2. Else (it ends in a vowel): ignoring ' and y, is there a consonant cluster in the first five letters? → brivla (predicate word).
3. Else → cmavo (structure word): no internal consonants, so cmavo can be run together without spaces.

Exactly. The big questions are: “Does it end in a consonant?” and “Is there a cluster in the first five letters?”

One cool thing: because cmavo never have internal clusters, you can actually run them together without spaces. For example, pu zi ze'u ri'a vi ve'a can be written simply as puzize'uri'avive'a.

That saves some space—though you have to be careful not to mistake a long chain of cmavo for a single long word!

Let's revisit stress for a moment. It works like this:

• brivla and cmevla: Stress the second-to-last syllable (y is ignored and does not count as a syllable here).
• cmavo: Stress is free. However, if a cmavo comes right before a brivla, it's usually not stressed.

Stress freedom! Cmavo rules sound a bit fiddly, but "don't stress right before the predicate" seems like a solid default.

True. For cmevla, there's also an exception: you can manually mark stress using CAPITAL LETTERS if you want it somewhere other than the second-to-last syllable. But for now, just sticking to the “second-to-last” rule is plenty.

Let's keep it simple for now! We can worry about the exceptions later.