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[Poster's note: This file is a copy of the descriptive text contained
in a brochure which The Loglan Institute sends out in response to an
initial request for information, plus brief descriptions of some of
the materials available for purchase. For a printed copy of the bro-
chure or any other information, write to The Institute at the address
given here, or send CompuServe MAIL to Kirk Sattley 76010,1363.]
THE LOGLAN INSTITUTE, INC.
A Non-Profit Research Corporation
3009 Peters Way
San Diego, CA 92117
What Is Loglan?
Loglan* is a speakable, human language originally designed to
serve as a test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the structure of
local human languages places local constraints on the development of
human thought, and hence, on human cultures. If this hypothesis is
correct, a language which "lifted" those constraints -- that is to
say, which reduced them to some formal minimum -- should in a certain
sense "release" the human mind from these ancient linguistic bonds
and, in any case, have notable effects on both individual thinking and
on the development of a global human culture.
Since its original development in the late 1950's and 1960's
Loglan has acquired certain other properties that make it interesting
to computer science, principally (1) its total freedom from syntactic
ambiguity. This feature of the language, together with (2) its audio-
visual "isomorphism" (which means that the Loglan speechstream breaks
up automatically into fully punctuated strings of separate words) and
(3) its borrowing algorithm (by which the International Scientific
Vocabulary goes into Loglan virtually ad libitum) makes it an ideal
medium for three uses: (i) for international information storage and
retrieval, (ii) for machine-aided translation between natural lan-
guages, and (iii) for spontaneous interaction between computer-users
and their machines. Finally, Loglan is (4) culturally and politically
neutral in the sense that its basic predicate vocabulary has been
engineered to be maximally memorable to speakers of the eight most
widely spoken human languages: English, Chinese,Hindi, Russian,
Spanish, French, Japanese and German.
All these features taken together have suggested to many loglan-
ists that their adopted language is ideally suited to become a second
language for the world. For others, conducting a scientific test of
the Whorf hypothesis with Loglan has the highest priority. For still
others, its use at the human/machine interface is the most challenging
role for Loglan in the years ahead.
Going Public Again
Your inquiry reaches The Institute at a most interesting time.
Loglan is in the midst of "going public again". This is the third
and, we trust, final time. The first time we went public was in 1960,
when James Cooke Brown's article on "Loglan" was published in the
Scientific American for June of that year. (Reprints of this article
are still available.) The second time was in 1975, when two of our
books, Loglan 1, a grammar, and Loglan 4 & 5, a dictionary, were pub-
lished in paperback for the first time. The 15-year interval between
the 1st and 2nd "goings public" was mainly occupied by three activi-
ties: (a) the development of Loglan grammar on computers, (b) the
construction of its internationally-based lexicon, and (c) the prepa-
ration of the several earlier editions of the 1975 volumes. The
similar interval between the 2nd and 3rd "goings public" was mainly
occupied by engineering three final design features into the language.
One of these was the formal discovery and demonstration of the syntac-
tically unambiguous grammar mentioned above. This feature had long
been planned but had had to wait for the development of mathematical
tools powerful enough to install it; these became available in 1975.
Another engineering challenge was to build a set of decipherable word-
parts from which all the complex predicates of the language could be
recognizably constructed. Still a third engineering task was to build
its "borrowing algorithm", the procedure by which natural language
words, but especially the International Scientific Vocabulary, may now
be freely incoroporated into Loglan. These last two features together
implement yet another long-planned function of the language, namely
that it should be capable of rapid, spontaneous, and yet continuously
intelligible growth.
In short, modern Loglan is now ready for its many uses. Here are
the publications and services which The Institute has prepared to let
you examine this extraordinary language and decide whether and how you
wish to use it.
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