Au1100a.123
net.general
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!vax135!houxi!u1100a!rick
Thu Mar 25 11:26:40 1982
Re: Loglan
Yes! Loglan really exists. No! It is not a hypothetical
universal computer language invented by R.A. Heinlein. An
article describing it appeared in Scientific American long before
the publication of 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'. The author of
the article was James Cooke Browne. The title was 'LOGLAN', and
it was the cover article in the June, 1960 issue.
Loglan is an artificial language devised to test the 'Whorfian
Hypothesis' that the language in which our thoughts are expressed
completely circumscribes the potential content of those thoughts.
The idea is to define a language based on symbolic logic, which
is as completely devoid of cultural preconceptions as possible.
Those who have learned the language describe it as a mind
expanding experience.
The principles of orthogonality (in the sense used by the
designers of the Algol 68 computer language) and logical
completeness have been the primary driving forces in the design
of Loglan. The vocabulary is constructed based on a statistical
formula designed to make the individual words as easy as possible
to learn for the speakers of the world's major natural languages.
The choice of the 'base' natural languages was made on number of
speakers, either as primary or secondary language. They include
English, French, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, German, Japanese and
Spanish. The large Indo-European bias in this group can be
traced to the colonial activities of the English, Spanish, and
French in previous centurys. (Sorry 'bout that!) The phonology
of Loglan is designed to make it simple to discover the
boundaries between words and to identify the grammatical
categories of a word once it is isolated. This should make it
very easy for a computer to do 'natural language recognition'
from voice input when the voice is speaking Loglan. (I believe
that this property is what lead Heinlein to include Loglan in
'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.)
Loglan has undergone a great deal of revision since the
Scientific American article. A few years ago it 'went public'
with the publication of a group of three text books that
described the state of the language as it stood at that time. (A
grammar, and two dictionarys -- Loglan/English and
English/Loglan.) These books are now out of print, but a major
revision is in the works and should soon be available.
There is a small but active group of loglanists, calling
ourselves the Loglan Institute. We publish an 'occasional
journal' called "The Loglanist". Subscription is by deposit --
the pro-rata cost of producing your copies of the journal are
deducted from your deposit, and you are warned when the remainder
is below a threshold. Minimum deposits are $10.00 (US) for
individuals and $20.00 for institutions. The journal costs about
$3.00 per issue. If you wish to join, write to:
The Loglan Institute, Inc.
2261 Soledad Rancho Road
San Diego, CA 92109
You should probably request a full set of back issues when you
subscribe, because the discussions are nearly incomprehensible
unless you have been following them all along.
The Loglan Institute's latest project has been to 'clean-up' the
grammar so that it can be parsed by yacc (yes, the very same yacc
that we all know and love!) As of March 7, the grammar is
complete, covering all of spoken Loglan. It will be included in
the revised textbooks when they are published.
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Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
