Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site grkermit.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!grkermit!chris From: chris@grkermit.UUCP (Chris Hibbert) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: letter from the Loglan Institute (#3 of 3 {and final}) Message-ID: <665@grkermit.UUCP> Date: Thu, 29-Sep-83 12:58:28 EDT Article-I.D.: grkermit.665 Posted: Thu Sep 29 12:58:28 1983 Date-Received: Fri, 30-Sep-83 02:40:17 EDT Organization: GenRad Inc., Concord, MA Lines: 111 This is the third and final part of a letter I received from the Loglan Institute. Ignore any implications made by the titles of previous articles that there would be more or fewer parts to this posting The first part of the letter was an announcement that the Institute intended to go public soon with the advances they've made in the last 10 years. The second part was a list of the materials they had on hand (available for sale) leftover from previous states of the language. This final section of the letter is a list of the new materials they will make available sometime this fall. -------------------------------------------------- WHAT WILL BE AVAILABLE? The Institute plans to have on hand the following kit of learning materials before going public again: *Loglan 1: A Logical Language, 4th Edition* To keep it genuinely introductory, the new edition of this basic book by JCB will be only a modest revision of the 1975 edition. Almost all the changes since 1975 have been additions; so the basic structure of the language has not changed. All erroneous statements in the current text will of course be corrected, and many of the most useful additions will be described. But to keep this first volume as short as possible, the reader will be told that a formally complete account of the language will be found in *Loglan 6*, a new book described below. (No plans are made to reissue *Loglan 2: Methods of Construction.* All chapters of this 1967 work by JCB are still available in Vols.1,2 of *The Loglanist*.) *Loglan 3: Learning Loglan, 2nd Edition.* This work has gone through several revisions, having started life as a programmed textbook in 1960-62. But the traditional primer format works better with cassettes and flashcards. So the present series of 3 trial primer lessons will be extended to about 20 before being published as the first volume in the L3 series. It is our hope to extend the series to cover even the most advanced topics of grammar and usage. *Loglan 4 & 5: A Loglan-English & English-Loglan Dictionary, 3rd Edition.* The new edition will be updated for new usages and morphology, and the size of its solid interface with English will probably be increased by about three-fold. *Loglan 6: Formal Structures.* This will be an entirely new work and in reference manual format. It will provide an always-current, easily referenceable description of the entire rule structure of Loglan in a form suitable for those working on the interface. It will include the machine grammar, the preparser algorithms, the phonology and morphology, and the various algorithms linking these structures into a single whole. It is planned to include brief historical accounts of the critical reasoning which led to the adoption of each new feature since 1975. **LIP: The Loglan Interactive Parser.** This computer software is described in the current list of What's Available, [in my note "Letter from the Loglan Institute, Part 2 of 3"] and will need only to be updated with the most recent grammar. *MacTeach.* This is a general name for a series of CAI programs now in preparation. These programs will use lists of primitives, affixes, little words, place-structures, Corpus utterances and parses provided by the Institute, and teach vocabulary, predicate usage, word-making and -decipherment, and utterance formation. *Cassettes.* We plan to record a new series of casettes to be used independently or in conjunction with the computer-aided *MacTeach* programs. Thus the learner will be able to listen to and repeat the same Loglan that he or she is responding to visually and manually on the *MacTeach* programs. * * * * * * * * We plan to start printing books again just as soon as the new *Loglan 1* and *Loglan 3* are camera-ready, and the new lexicon has settled down enough to permit "official" input lists to be prepared for at least the first four MacTeach programs. Meanwhile, the MacTeach programs themselves will have bee thoroughly tested by the Members of the Institute, and some of the new Cassettes will have been recorded. Thus the initial kit we plan to sell will be L1, L3.1-20, M1-4 and C1-4, where '4' and '20' are approximate. Meanwhile, the dictionary-building and the final verification for the technical material in *Loglan 6* can be going forward. We expect these more labor-intensive works to appear within six monthes to a year from the publication of the initial learning kit. In the interval, there are a few old L4&5's left. These will be offered with correcting documents to those among our new Loglanists who are most impatient to learn the language. For those who do have home computers, the MacTeach vocabulary programs will serve many of the functions of a dictionary. Welcome aboard! JCB -------------------------------------------------- If any of you already have some of the previously mentioned materials, I would be interested in reviews. Also, I'm interested in reviews of these publications as they come out. It's not clear yet whether I'll get any of it, as I don't think there's anyone around that I could use the language with. If anyone wants to communicate on the net in Loglan, that might provide the impetus to me to get some of the material. If anyone out there is interested in translating the Loglan Parser into C, I'm sure the Institute would love to hear from you. Their address is now: The Loglan Institute Inc. Route 10, Box 269 Gainesville, FL 32601 and their phone number is (904) 371-9574.