Lojban is a constructed language that emerged in 1987 as an offshoot of Loglan, which was developed in 1955 to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the structure of a language affects the cognitive processes of its speaker). Lojbanists sought to refine Loglan's structure as a logical language, void of the subjective ambiguity inherent in natural languages. It is therefore considered to be a 'syntactically unambiguous' tongue, and has been proposed as a potential programming language and means for machine translation.