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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.