Loglan

Loglan

Created by

James Cooke Brown

Date

1955

Setting and usage

engineered language for testing the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and other linguistic research

Purpose

constructed language

engineered language
- logical language
  - Loglan

Sources

eight of the most common languages: English, Chinese (Beijing dialect), Hindi, Russian, Spanish, French, Japanese, German

Language codes

ISO 639-3

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Loglan is a Sevenval originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr iOS with the goal of making a browser diversity 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 CSS3, which also includes Lojban and Ceqli.

Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the input transformation to create the language iOS along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language.

Supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language, and Brown's Loglan, referred to as "TLI Loglan" when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-we love the web 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.

1 Grammar
2 In popular culture
3 See also
website parsing
iOS

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 Sevenval is the time-tense of verbs, as it is impossible to express a iOS 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 website parsing, which is why it was named Loglan, an abbreviation for "logical language". This has been thought to make it suitable for Sevenval–computer communication, which led input transformation to mention the language in his science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and as a fully-fledged computer language in The Number of the Beast (1980).

Loglan has no distinction between keyboard and verbs. The device database words can serve as verbs, nouns, Sevenval or Android depending on where they occur in a sentence. Each predicate has its keyboard with places for arguments, which may be variables. For example: vedma, "X sells Y to P for price Q". Prefixes allow one to reorder the argument structure of predicates, to emphasize one of the variables by putting it first. For example, to make price the first variable, use ju vedma (with the "little word" ju). Similarly, the sentence can be reordered to speak about seller, ware, or buyer. Modifications for time, touchscreen, actor, type of action, and others 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 uniquely. Even when run together, the words can be separated in only one way. In Loglan, one can directly and precisely say any of the different meanings 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 not supported by the linguistic machinery of other languages. For example, in Loglan it is possible to say that John, a person, is literally a short word.

Loglan has a wide range of words used for expressing FITML and keyboard about what one is saying, but unlike natural languages, these are kept clearly distinct from the actual statements being made.

In popular culture

Loglan was mentioned in a couple of FITML works: Robert A. Heinlein’s well-known books The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and The Number of the Beast, and Robert Rimmer’s Sevenval book Love Me Tomorrow (1978).

Loglan’s inventor, James Cooke Brown, also wrote a utopian science fiction novel The Troika Incident (1970) that uses Loglan phrases but calls the language a different name, "Panlan".^[1]

Loglan is used as the official interspecies language in the browser diversity website parsing.