jack (05/01/83)
A few subscribers to net.nlang have expressed some curiosity
about Loglan. I am responding with a little information
about the language. If people express more interest, I may
leak more information.
Since I am communicating to you without voice, if I'm to give
any examples, I must first address the written language, so
you will know how to pronounce the examples. However, since
it took me a 49 line letter to explain writing, I'll jump
into some grammar notes without examples in this submission.
Each Loglan word falls in one of three classes: names,
predicate words, and "little words". A listener or reader
can tell into which of these classes any word falls without
necessarily knowing its meaning.
The entire extralingual semantic load is carried by the names
and predicate words. Predicate words, which are
syntactically interchangable (except that some don't take as
many arguments as others), take the semantic place of common
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in natural languages.
(If your English teacher told you a noun stands for a person,
place, or thing, she was lying. Point to the person, place,
or thing represented by the common noun "cat", if you can.
What a common noun really is is a word that can grammatically
fill the blank in a sentence form such as "I hit the ____.")
Any predicate can modify any predicate. It's just as easy to
say something is a catish kind of grey thing as to say it's a
grey cat.
Semantically, predicates assert some relation among things or
some property of something. To express the meaning of a
Loglan predicate in English, we give an English sentence with
blanks in it (the blanks are often represented in writing in
English about Loglan (English meta-Loglan?) by the non-Loglan
capital letters X, Y, W, H, and Q, in that order). For
example, there is a predicate word that means X sells Y to W
for price H. With one or two little words in front of it (an
article and possibly a "converter"), this word can be used to
refer to something as a seller, a buyer, merchandise, or a
price. (Referring to something by its having some property
is not the same as asserting that it has that property. An
example of the former in English is "The cat . . .", of the
latter, ". . . is a cat".)
Names in Loglan, like names in natural language, stand for
specific referents.
Articles, pronouns, conjunctions, the sentence separator,
tense markers, and words of several other parts of speech are
little words. Little words communicate about the structure
of the utterance (or the mood of the speaker).
The basic sentence form is:
[argument] predicate [argument [argument [argument]]]
The predicate part of the sentence can be a predicate word.
Some of the allowable argument forms are: a pronoun, a
predicate with an appropriate article in front of it, or a
name with the name-article "la" in front of it. (A little
word may have to separate the front argument from the
predicate, to avoid ambiguity about what modifies what).
This exposition has reached the point where Loglan examples
would be helpful, so I'll break off and see if anyone is
interested in knowing more. If so, I could post or send an
article about spelling and pronounciation (already written),
followed by examples.
Jack Waugh
Reston, Va.
{seismo | lime | mcnc | we13 | brl-bmd}!rlgvax!jack