jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh) (01/05/86)
> A month or so ago, I asked for some information about the planetary > languages, such as Esperanto. . . . See also Loglan (Scientific American, June, 1960). Loglan is still being worked on by a few people. When it Goes Public Again, as it should any year now, it may be better than Esperanto because of being based on more recent linguistics. A nice feature of Loglan is its lack of distinction between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. One part of speech -- the predicate word -- takes care of all these functions. Since I became acquainted with Loglan, the idea of distinguishing between nouns and adjectives (which Esperanto seems to) in artificial language seems superfluous to me. In a recent article here, someone gave an example context in a creole language where an adjective or verb could be inserted. That example encourages the hope that grammatical distinctions among words with extrlingual import (nouns, verbs, etc.) are not necessary. Posters have said Esperanto is easy to learn. Being easy to learn was one of the original design goals of Loglan. I hope the next public version exhibits this desired ease. I don't know whether it will be as easy as Esperanto. One of the ways Loglan tries to be easy to learn is by using the eight most known natural languages as sources for sounds for root words. The proportion of people in the world who know each contributing language determines the proportion of that language's contribution to Loglan roots. The two largest contributors are Mandarin and English in that order. I think the vast majority of Loglan root words ("Loglan primitives", i. e., predicate words that are not made from other Loglan words) get their sounds from no other source than Mandarin and English. As an example of how I, an English-speaker with a little French, can recognize natural language roots in a Loglan word (thus making the word easier to remember), we have English "green", French "vert", Loglan "vegri". "I am greener than you." -> "Mi na vegri tu". Jack (la Djek in Loglan)
urban@spp2.UUCP (Mike Urban) (01/06/86)
In article <886@rlgvax.UUCP> jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh) writes: >> A month or so ago, I asked for some information about the planetary >> languages, such as Esperanto. >. . . > >See also Loglan (Scientific American, June, 1960). > >Loglan is still being worked on by a few people. When it Goes >Public Again, as it should any year now, it may be better than >Esperanto because of being based on more recent linguistics. > I have studied both Loglan and Esperanto, and I think that saying that Loglan is "better" than Esperanto is misleading. The stated purpose for Esperanto is international communication, simplicity of grammar, and recognition of vocabulary. The stated purpose for Loglan is to test the Whorf hypothesis that language shapes thought. Thus, it is UNdesirable for Loglan to have a vocabulary that strongly resembles any particular language (as Esperanto resembles the Romance family), since that reduces the degree of isolation in which the hypothesized Whorf effects can be studied. Similarly, Esperanto contains many cases of lexical ambiguity (also known as puns) because it was not considered worthwhile to chase down every possible ambiguity, and because it allows for certain modes of poetic expression. Loglan, with its expressed goal of being an unamibiguous, logical language, cannot preserve this feature of "natural" language. While Loglan's vocabulary may be "recognizable" (if you can recognize "vegri" as "green"), its grammar is rather difficult to learn directly, especially for speakers of Indo-european languages. To translate "I want to buy a car", you have to first decide whether you mean "there exists an x such that x is a car and I want to buy x" or "I want to buy one element of the car class". Even the stated example (mi na vegri tu) is not the correct translation of what would usually be meant by "I am greener than you", since the "timeless" tense (mi vegri tu) is probably more appropriate than the present tense (I am currently greener than you). Not particularly easy or simple. Finally, the (admittedly modest) success of Esperanto is a demonstration that "a priori" considerations of "modern linguistics" seem to be less important than an intuitive sense of sound and meaning. As J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out ("A Secret Vice"), one of Esperanto's better features is that it was designed by a single man, rather than a committee. Later attempts to improve on the Esperanto model according to "modern linguistic" ideas (Ido, Interlingua, Novial, Interglossa...) have been failures for this reason. It sounds illogical, but because Esperanto is, in part, a work of "art", it has a "soul" that is lacking in the other projects. Why this should be important might make a useful area for study. Actually, there's a PhD dissertation on the Esperanto Movement from a sociological perspective that I intend to read someday. And just to clarify, I think that Loglan is an extremely interesting language: the only language I know of that is syntactically and lexically unambiguous and whose domain of discourse is the real world. Learning Loglan, I feel, *does* allow one to expand the way one thinks about language and thought, and I recommend it to people interested in language and/or philosophy. You really have to think about what you mean when you say something in Loglan, and it'd be fun to try to translate a bureaucrat's wordy jargon-filled memo into Loglan! So by all means, examine Loglan. I just feel that it is misleading to represent it as a "competitor" to Esperanto. -- Mike Urban {ucbvax|decvax}!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban "You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"
goldberg@SU-Russell.ARPA (01/10/86)
In article <886@rlgvax.UUCP> jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh) writes: ... >A nice feature of Loglan is its lack of distinction between >nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. One part of speech -- >the predicate word -- takes care of all these functions. Since >I became acquainted with Loglan, the idea of distinguishing >between nouns and adjectives (which Esperanto seems to) in >artificial language seems superfluous to me. In a recent article >here, someone gave an example context in a creole language where >an adjective or verb could be inserted. That example encourages >the hope that grammatical distinctions among words with extrlingual >import (nouns, verbs, etc.) are not necessary. > >Jack (la Djek in Loglan) There are languages in which the distinction between adjectives and verbs, or adjectives and nouns is very fuzzy. Some linguists argue that in at least some of these languages the category Adjective doesn't exist [R.M. W. Dixon, 1977. `Where have all the adjectives gone?'. _Studies in Language_, I.19--80.]. Others disagree, but Dixon's case is fairly strong. There has been only one claim as far as I know of a language that didn't distinguish nouns and verbs: (Nootka by Sapir). More recent work has called that claim into serious doubt. The point is simply that Loglan is appearenntly trying to do away with something that is an intrinsic part of natural language. Categories such as Noun and Verb are no accident in the languages of the world, and while a language without the distinction might be easier to learn, I suspect that it would be nearly impossible to use. -jeff goldberg -- Jeff Goldberg (best reached at GOLDBERG@SU-CSLI.ARPA)