Loglan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the constructed spoken language. For the programming language, see Loglan 88.

Loglan
Created by:	James Cooke Brown	1955
Setting and usage:	engineered language for testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and other linguistic research
Total speakers:	—
Category (purpose):	constructed language engineered language logical language Loglan
Category (sources):	the eight most common languages - English, Beijing Dialect of Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`art`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	—
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr. James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages, which also includes Lojban and Ceqli.

Dr. Brown founded The Loglan Institute to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language a research project that was never complete; so although he released many papers about its design he never "released" it freely to the general public. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed The Logical Language Group to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language.

The supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language, and that of The Loglan Institute. They refer to the latter language as TLI Loglan when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-trademarkability of the term Loglan was eventually upheld by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, many supporters and members of The Loglan Institute find this usage offensive, and reserve Loglan for the TLI version of the language.

[edit] Grammar

Brown intended Loglan to be as culturally neutral as possible, and metaphysically parsimonious, which means that obligatory categories are kept to a minimum. An example of an obligatory category in English is the time-tense of verbs, as it is impossible to express a finite verb without also expressing a tense.

Also, Brown intended the language to be totally regular and unambiguous. In particular, phonemes that could be confused with each other were to be avoided.

The language's grammar is based on predicate logic, which is why it was named Loglan, an abbreviation for "logical language". This has been thought to make it suitable for human-computer communication, an application that led Robert A. Heinlein to mention the language in his science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Loglan has no distinction between nouns and verbs. The predicate words can serve as verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs depending on where they occur in a sentence. The predicates each have a different argument structure with places for arguments, which may be variables: e.g. vedma: "X sells Y to P for price Q". There are prefixes to reorder the argument structure of predicates, for example, price would be ju vedma (with the "little word" ju) to make price the first variable. With different reorderings, one speaks of seller, ware, or buyer. Tenses for time, location, actor, type of action, etc., are provided by "little words" which are optional. Predicates can be compounded. A predicate can act as an argument of another predicate, when the former is prefixed by a "little word".

The language is designed so that the patterns of phonemes always parse into words. Even when run together, the words can be separated in only one way.

In Loglan, it is possible to say that John, a person, is literally a short word. Or one can directly and precisely say any of the 22 different meanings^{(dubious; discuss)} of the English phrase "a pretty little girls school." This feature is so pronounced that people fluent in Loglan say impossible things as a sort of joke—a type of humor simply not supported by the linguistic machinery of other languages.