[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. _________________________ *`Loglan' is a registered trademark of The Loglan Institute, Inc. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + [Poster's note: The following is a much abbreviated extract from four pages of descriptions of materials available. I have chosen the ones I thought most likely to interest an inquiring language-lover, especially one who uses a personal computer.] BOOKS Loglan 1: A Logical Language by James Cooke Brown, 4th Edition, 1989; 599pp. A general introduction and complete description of the Loglan language. Has detailed explanation of the language's syntax and word- construction, as well as pronunciation guides, historical notes, specimen translations, word-lists, and a chapter on testing the Whorf hypothesis. [$21.50] Loglan 4 & 5: A Loglan-English/English-Loglan Dictionary, collated by JCB, 2nd Edition 1975; 510pp. [New edition in preparation, old one still useful as word-source when checked against new Loglan 1.] [Paperback $10.00; Hardback $15.00] SOFTWARE [All available for both PC-DOS machines and Macintoshes] MacTeach* 1: Forming Loglan Utterances, MacTeach 2: Learning Loglan Words, MacTeach 3: Learning Loglan Affixes, by Robert A. McIvor, Evelyn R. Anderson, and JCB, 1st Edition 1989. All of these use the "learning ladder" technique developed at The Institute to teach both utterance formation and vocabulary acquisition. The technique helps the learner master long lists of items with minimum overlearning and error-making. MacTeach 1 comes with an input file of about 400 utterances, covering about 75% of the grammar. MacTeach 2 has an input list of more than 900 primitive words. MacTeach 3 has the complete set of combining affixes used for forming complex predicates. [$20.00 each, all three on one disk $50.00] LIP*, The Loglan Interactive Parser*, by RAM, Scott L. Burson, JCB, and other workers on the Machine Grammar Project. LIP will produce a parse-tree or sentence-diagram syntactic analysis of any grammatical sentence that is submitted to it, as well as pointing out where an ungrammatical sentence went wrong. LIP can also parse a text file, either utterance-by-utterance or all at once, and allows individual utterances to be modified interactively until they are correct. It is thus a useful tool for an aspiring Loglan writer as well as a practically indispensable one for a teacher or editor. [$50.00] AUDIO RECORDINGS Cassette 1: Readings from Loglan 1, Chaps 2-4, Cassette 2: Readings from Loglan 1, Chaps 5,6. On these two cassettes, all the Loglan sentences in Chapters 2 through 6 of Loglan 1 are plainly pronounced by competent readers, so the learner will learn to speak the entire grammatical range of Loglan utterance forms correctly. [$10.00 for each cassette] MEMBERSHIP Ordinary membership is $50 per two-year period. Several classes of membership at lower and higher dues are available. Members receive a quarterly newletter "Lognet" as well as a 40% discount on purchases of all Institute materials. _________________________ *`MacTeach', `LIP', and `The Loglan Interactive Parser' are trademarks of The Loglan Institute.