Loglan is a logical constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr. James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. In 1960, Scientific American published an article introducing the language. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages, which also includes Lojban. Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many publications about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the Logical Language Group to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. Supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language and Brown's Loglan, referred to as "TLI Loglan" when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-trademarkability of the term Loglan was eventually upheld by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, many supporters and members of The Loglan Institute find this usage offensive and reserve Loglan for the TLI version of the language.
Goals
Loglan (an abbreviation for "logical language") was created to investigate whether people speaking a "logical language" would in some way think more logically, as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis might predict. The language's grammar is based on predicate logic. The grammar was intended to be small enough to be teachable and manageable, yet complex enough to allow people to think and converse in the language. Brown intended Loglan to be as culturally neutral as possible and metaphysically parsimonious, which means that obligatory categories are kept to a minimum. An example of an obligatory category in English is the time-tense of verbs, as it is impossible to express a finite verb without also expressing a tense. Brown also intended the language to be completely regular and unambiguous. Each sentence can be parsed in only one way. Furthermore, the syllabic structure of words was designed so that a sequence of syllables can be separated into words in only one way, even if the word separation is not clear from pauses in speech. It has a small number of phonemes, so that regional "accents" are less likely to produce unintelligible speech. To make the vocabulary easier to learn, words were constructed to have elements in common with related words in the world's eight most widely spoken languages.
Alphabet and pronunciation The alphabet of Loglan has two historical versions. In that of 1975 there were only 21 letters with their corresponding phonemes. In the final version of 1989 five more phonemes had been incorporated: letter H (/h/) was added to the alphabet in 1977 by popular demand; letter Y (/ə/) was added in 1982 to work as a kind of hyphen between the terms of a complex word; letters Q (/θ/), W (/y/) and X (/x/) were added in 1986 in order to allow the incorporation of the Linnaean vocabulary of biology, and they were useful to give more exact pronunciations to many borrowed names.
The letters I and U when placed before vowels represent the IPA sounds /j/ and /w/ respectively. For example: ie /je/ ("what?"), ue /we/ ("what!" as an expression of surprise or interest).
Grammar
Loglan has three types of words: predicates (also called content words), structure words (also called little words), and names. The majority of words are predicates; these are words that carry meaning. Structure words are words that modify predicates or show how they are related to each other, like English conjunctions and prepositions. The class of a word can be determined from its form. A predicate has always two or more syllables, the last syllable being of the form CV, and the other syllables being of the form CVC or CCV. Thus, possible predicates are "kanto", "stari", "simgroma", "nirpatretka", and so on. A structure word has always one or more syllables, each syllable being one of the four forms V, VV, CV, or CVV. Thus possible structure words are "e", "ai", "ga", "kia", "lemio", "inorau" and so on. A name may have any form but always ends with a consonant, which distinguishes names from other words, since predicates and structure words always end in a vowel. Names in Loglan are spelled in accordance with Loglan phonetics, so if the name comes from another language, the Loglan spelling may differ from the spelling in that language. If a name in its native language ends in a vowel, it is conventional to add an "s" to form the Loglan name; for example, the English name "Mary" is rendered in Loglan as "Meris" (pronounced /ˈmɛriːs/).
Predicates Loglan makes no distinction between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. A predicate may act as any of these, depending on its position in a sentence. Each predicate has its own argument structure with fixed positions for arguments. For example: vedma is the word for "sell". It takes four arguments: the seller, the item sold, the buyer and the price, in that order. When a predicate is used as a verb, the first argument appears before the predicate, and any subsequent arguments appear after it. So "S pa vedma T B P" means "S sold T to B for price P". (The structure word "pa" is the past-tense marker, discussed in more detail below.) Not all arguments need to be present; for example, "S pa vedma T B" means "S sold T to B", "S pa vedma T" means "S sold T", and "S pa vedma" simply means "S sold (something)". Certain structure words can be used to reorder the arguments of a predicate, to emphasize one of the arguments by putting it first. For example, "nu" swaps the first and second arguments of any predicate. So "T pa nu vedma S" means the same thing as "S pa vedma T" and might be translated "T was sold by S". Similarly, "fu" swaps the first and third argument, and "ju" swaps the first and fourth argument. Thus "B pa fu vedma T S" = "B bought T from S", and "P pa ju vedma T B" = "P was paid to buy T by B".
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