keller (04/28/83)
#N:uicsl:8600002:000:430 uicsl!keller Apr 27 17:18:00 1983 I've wanted to learn about Loglan for a long time, but never went to the library to look it up. The only thing I know about it is that it exists and is somehow a "logical" natural language, and this I know because I read an ad for a Loglan dictionary in some magazine about 8 years ago. What is Loglan and does anyone use it? Does it relate to Esperanto? Are there other planned languages that have a following? Shaun Keller
mark (04/30/83)
loglan is indeed a logical language - logical in its phonetics, etymology and syntax, that is. it is not a natural language, but is intended to be able to replace such, so its semantics cannot be any more logical than whatever you may wish to talk about. a politician could be just as vacuous in loglan as in english, though he might have trouble slipping logical fallacies past his audience, since they would be bad grammar. loglan started as a tool for linguistic experimentation, but is now getting lots of attention from computer people. it could be very good for speaking to computers, since it eliminates all the messy problems of recognizing separate words and sorting out ambiguous grammar. the string of phonemes (sounds) in a loglan utterance can be unambiguously (and simply) divided into words, and the syntax has been rendered in machine-parsable form (ie yacc can make sense of it). the possible value of loglan as an international language was kept in mind from the start. its basic vocabulary is designed to be as mnemonic as possible to speakers of the eight most widespread languages (unlike esperonto, which i gather is all drawn from the romance languages). the language's sounds were chosen to be pronouncable by speakers of all these tongues, and to not be distortable into eachother by national accents. the best bet for learning about loglan is probably the scientific american article which appeared, i think, in the 1960's. any library which has s.a. should also have the index to it. loglan has changed much since then, but the basic principles are intact. publications about loglan have never been widly circulated, and i don't think there has ever been anything published in loglan (except within stuff about it). the language is currently undergoing a major revision, which renders the existing books obsolete (they are long out of print anyway) and is still occupying all the available time of those who will write the new ones (and the journal, too. it hasn't come out for many months). all of the above is off the top of my head. i have followed loglan's progress in a cursory way for years, and have most of the published material on it, but am no kind of authority. loa la mark ps (what is loglan for "ps"?) i seem to recall two previous attempts to get a loglan discussion going, without effect. is this really all the interest there is?