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Loglan - an artificial spoken language


What is Loglan?[1]

Loglan[2] 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 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 languages, 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
languages: English, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, French,
Japanese and German.

All these features taken together have suggested to many
loglanists 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.

[1] Reprinted with permission
[2] Loglan is a registered trademark of
The Loglan Institute, Inc.

Books, software, tapes, membership in the institute,
and other items are available from:

The Loglan Institute, Inc.
A Non-Profit Research Corporation
1701 Northeast 75th Street
Gainesville FL 32601
U.S.A
(904) 371-9574
 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

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