6 ms·

Loglan – a predicate logic-based language for humans

98 points by entelechy 8y ago

village-idiot 8y ago
Loglan was for research purposes, IIRC. For actual usage, what little exists, it’s largely supplanted by Lojban.
- wirrbel 8y ago
  I think there were license issues involved also. Logan authors wouldn't let the community grow and own the language.
PinkMilkshake 8y ago
I've always had an interest in invented languages and spent some time lurking the conlang/worldlang/auxlang communities. They are a very eccentric and confrontational bunch of people, to put it mildly The most interesting auxlang project I ever came across was Unish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unish), mainly because it is the only one I know of created at a university by trained linguists. It's word selection was highly methodical (http://www.unish.net/introduce/e_unish_Word.jsp http://www.unish.net/introduce/e_unish_Word.jsp) unlike most invented languages which are based on the personal tastes of the inventor. Check out the book In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent for a fun and interesting look at the whole topic.
- interfixus 8y ago
  My highschool latin teacher - a highly idiosyncratic individual, not to put too fine a point on it - constructed not one, but two completely artificial languages, although to be fair, one was a derivative of the other, sort of the way many modern tongues are of latin. The thing is, these were thorougly developed and well thought out constructs - the 'classical' one of them in particular being logically structured and built up from fundamental particles. Felt very much like real languages from what I saw of them. And as probably his only pupil ever to express an interest, believe me, I saw quite a lot. I can still picture him coming to a halt somewhere on the main street, scribbling in his ever present notebook if some new idea had presented itself. And I knew a fresh presentation would be coming up... Idiosyncratic to begin with, and sliding into decidedly bunkers. He was pensioned off early from his teaching position, and later disappeared on a mountain trek. His languages went with him.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  > It's word selection was highly methodical unlike most invented languages which are based on the personal tastes of the inventor. Another language like this is Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
garmaine 8y ago
This Slate Star Codex post has more substance for its non-existent philosophical language than all of Loglan/lojban. It is a controversial statement but I’ll stand by it: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/06/raikoth-laws-language-and-society/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/06/raikoth-laws-language-a... There is a lot of very interesting things that could be done with a human language that had a precise function mapping 1:1 utterances to semantics, which syntactically required specifying source of knowledge and uncertainty, and supported strongly typed noun phrase constructions. Unfortunately that’s not loglan. The only thing loglan rigorously defines was the syntax and morphology, which ironically is basically a solved problem for natural languages today. Context is all you need to parse a sentence as well as a human, or better, and rigorously defining context was explicitly excluded from the scope of loglan/lojban :(
- wirrbel 8y ago
  It's funny how Turkish already is kind of close to a conlang like Lojban
  - garmaine 8y ago
    How so?
    - 80386 8y ago
      This might be referring to the regular grammar of Turkish. In Turkish, if you have a plural noun in the ablative case (roughly meaning 'out from'), you show this by attaching the plural suffix and the ablative suffix to the noun. For example, 'ev' means 'house', '-ler' is the plural suffix, and '-den' is the ablative suffix, so 'evlerden' means 'from (the) houses'. In Latin (and most Indo-European languages that preserve case), on the other hand, you have one marker for 'ablative plural', that's completely distinct from (most) other case-forms of the plural, and from the ablative singular. So 'domus' means 'house' (in the nominative singular -- there are no zero-marked nouns in Latin, which means that every noun has an explicit case+number marker), 'domibus' means 'from (the) houses', and 'domū' means 'from the/a house'. This also applies to verbs. In Latin, you have one single marker on the verb that signifies tense, aspect, mood, and person. Passive verbs conjugate completely differently from active verbs, for example. In Turkish, you generally have one marker per thing signified. (English has lost most of this inflection, but we still have -s for third-person singular present active.) There's also a lot more irregularity in Turkish than in Latin. Latin has five declensions for nouns and four conjugations for verbs -- so 'domus' takes a completely different set of case markers from 'Rōma'. In fact, 'domus' doesn't really fit into the declension system at all -- it's entirely irregular. (Think English strong verbs.) The thing about this is that it's actually Latin that's crosslinguistically weird here, rather than Turkish. Most languages are more like either Turkish (lots of affixes, each of which with one and only one meaning) or Chinese (not many affixes at all) than Latin (affixes which mean several different things at once). Most Indo-European languages are to some extent like Latin, but most non-Indo-European languages aren't very much like Latin. Turkish also doesn't have grammatical gender, or any sort of noun class system at all. (Grammatical gender is one type of noun class system, common in the Indo-European languages.) But noun class systems aren't cross-linguistically uncommon.
wirrbel 8y ago
I think this should mention Lojban. The spin off with a larger community. In my younger yearsi tried to learn some Lojban. But it was hard. The extreme regularity and brevity of the vocabulary made it difficult to remember words. Also the grammar has a lot of features, special particles allow for flipping word order. Such stuff is actually very confusing. What i really liked about it is that it allows you to phrase things as precise or as vague as you intend.
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  It's like the APL of constructed languages.
  - forgotpwd16 8y ago
    That will be Ithkuil with its weird complex rules and alien writing system made from a vast character set.
    - Jtsummers 8y ago
      APL has a very simple ruleset once you sit down and learn it. The character set is large, though (a positive in my opinion, but not for everyone).
  - fusiongyro 8y ago
    It's more like Prolog with a maximum arity of 5 and about a thousand particles with complicated effects. The reference text says with some pride that it is "as simple as C++."
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Or perl.
- wingerlang 8y ago
  What i really liked about it is that it allows you to phrase things as precise or as vague as you intend. Is it possible to get some examples of this?
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
first thing that came to my head was Newspeak
- G4BB3R 8y ago
  Lojban is the inverse of Newspeak.
xvilka 8y ago
There is also one more interesting specimen - Ithkuil[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
- inherentFloyd 8y ago
  There was a fascinating article posted to HN a little while ago about Ithkuil's creator's relationship with its users. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
jshprentz 8y ago
The 2015 HN discussion of Loglan [0] included links to XKCD [1] and its debunking [2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10075196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10075196 [1] https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/ [2] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/File:xkcd_comic_debunker.png https://mw.lojban.org/papri/File:xkcd_comic_debunker.png

98 points by entelechy 8y ago

village-idiot 8y ago

Loglan was for research purposes, IIRC. For actual usage, what little exists, it’s largely supplanted by Lojban.

wirrbel 8y ago
I think there were license issues involved also. Logan authors wouldn't let the community grow and own the language.

PinkMilkshake 8y ago

I've always had an interest in invented languages and spent some time lurking the conlang/worldlang/auxlang communities. They are a very eccentric and confrontational bunch of people, to put it mildly The most interesting auxlang project I ever came across was Unish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unish), mainly because it is the only one I know of created at a university by trained linguists. It's word selection was highly methodical (http://www.unish.net/introduce/e_unish_Word.jsp http://www.unish.net/introduce/e_unish_Word.jsp) unlike most invented languages which are based on the personal tastes of the inventor. Check out the book In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent for a fun and interesting look at the whole topic.

interfixus 8y ago
My highschool latin teacher - a highly idiosyncratic individual, not to put too fine a point on it - constructed not one, but two completely artificial languages, although to be fair, one was a derivative of the other, sort of the way many modern tongues are of latin. The thing is, these were thorougly developed and well thought out constructs - the 'classical' one of them in particular being logically structured and built up from fundamental particles. Felt very much like real languages from what I saw of them. And as probably his only pupil ever to express an interest, believe me, I saw quite a lot. I can still picture him coming to a halt somewhere on the main street, scribbling in his ever present notebook if some new idea had presented itself. And I knew a fresh presentation would be coming up... Idiosyncratic to begin with, and sliding into decidedly bunkers. He was pensioned off early from his teaching position, and later disappeared on a mountain trek. His languages went with him.
codetrotter 8y ago
> It's word selection was highly methodical unlike most invented languages which are based on the personal tastes of the inventor. Another language like this is Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

garmaine 8y ago

This Slate Star Codex post has more substance for its non-existent philosophical language than all of Loglan/lojban. It is a controversial statement but I’ll stand by it: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/06/raikoth-laws-language-and-society/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/06/raikoth-laws-language-a... There is a lot of very interesting things that could be done with a human language that had a precise function mapping 1:1 utterances to semantics, which syntactically required specifying source of knowledge and uncertainty, and supported strongly typed noun phrase constructions. Unfortunately that’s not loglan. The only thing loglan rigorously defines was the syntax and morphology, which ironically is basically a solved problem for natural languages today. Context is all you need to parse a sentence as well as a human, or better, and rigorously defining context was explicitly excluded from the scope of loglan/lojban :(

wirrbel 8y ago
It's funny how Turkish already is kind of close to a conlang like Lojban
- garmaine 8y ago
  How so?
  - 80386 8y ago
    This might be referring to the regular grammar of Turkish. In Turkish, if you have a plural noun in the ablative case (roughly meaning 'out from'), you show this by attaching the plural suffix and the ablative suffix to the noun. For example, 'ev' means 'house', '-ler' is the plural suffix, and '-den' is the ablative suffix, so 'evlerden' means 'from (the) houses'. In Latin (and most Indo-European languages that preserve case), on the other hand, you have one marker for 'ablative plural', that's completely distinct from (most) other case-forms of the plural, and from the ablative singular. So 'domus' means 'house' (in the nominative singular -- there are no zero-marked nouns in Latin, which means that every noun has an explicit case+number marker), 'domibus' means 'from (the) houses', and 'domū' means 'from the/a house'. This also applies to verbs. In Latin, you have one single marker on the verb that signifies tense, aspect, mood, and person. Passive verbs conjugate completely differently from active verbs, for example. In Turkish, you generally have one marker per thing signified. (English has lost most of this inflection, but we still have -s for third-person singular present active.) There's also a lot more irregularity in Turkish than in Latin. Latin has five declensions for nouns and four conjugations for verbs -- so 'domus' takes a completely different set of case markers from 'Rōma'. In fact, 'domus' doesn't really fit into the declension system at all -- it's entirely irregular. (Think English strong verbs.) The thing about this is that it's actually Latin that's crosslinguistically weird here, rather than Turkish. Most languages are more like either Turkish (lots of affixes, each of which with one and only one meaning) or Chinese (not many affixes at all) than Latin (affixes which mean several different things at once). Most Indo-European languages are to some extent like Latin, but most non-Indo-European languages aren't very much like Latin. Turkish also doesn't have grammatical gender, or any sort of noun class system at all. (Grammatical gender is one type of noun class system, common in the Indo-European languages.) But noun class systems aren't cross-linguistically uncommon.

wirrbel 8y ago

I think this should mention Lojban. The spin off with a larger community. In my younger yearsi tried to learn some Lojban. But it was hard. The extreme regularity and brevity of the vocabulary made it difficult to remember words. Also the grammar has a lot of features, special particles allow for flipping word order. Such stuff is actually very confusing. What i really liked about it is that it allows you to phrase things as precise or as vague as you intend.

PinkMilkshake 8y ago
It's like the APL of constructed languages.
- forgotpwd16 8y ago
  That will be Ithkuil with its weird complex rules and alien writing system made from a vast character set.
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    APL has a very simple ruleset once you sit down and learn it. The character set is large, though (a positive in my opinion, but not for everyone).
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  It's more like Prolog with a maximum arity of 5 and about a thousand particles with complicated effects. The reference text says with some pride that it is "as simple as C++."
- garmaine 8y ago
  Or perl.
wingerlang 8y ago
What i really liked about it is that it allows you to phrase things as precise or as vague as you intend. Is it possible to get some examples of this?

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

first thing that came to my head was Newspeak

G4BB3R 8y ago
Lojban is the inverse of Newspeak.

xvilka 8y ago

There is also one more interesting specimen - Ithkuil[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

inherentFloyd 8y ago
There was a fascinating article posted to HN a little while ago about Ithkuil's creator's relationship with its users. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...

jshprentz 8y ago

The 2015 HN discussion of Loglan [0] included links to XKCD [1] and its debunking [2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10075196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10075196 [1] https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/ [2] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/File:xkcd_comic_debunker.png https://mw.lojban.org/papri/File:xkcd_comic_debunker.png