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From: jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Artificial Language
Message-ID: <886@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 4-Jan-86 20:11:24 EST
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.886
Posted: Sat Jan  4 20:11:24 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 5-Jan-86 05:46:25 EST
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> A month or so ago, I asked for some information about the planetary
> languages, such as Esperanto.
. . .

See also Loglan (Scientific American, June, 1960).

Loglan is still being worked on by a few people.  When it Goes
Public Again, as it should any year now, it may be better than
Esperanto because of being based on more recent linguistics.

A nice feature of Loglan is its lack of distinction between
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.  One part of speech --
the predicate word -- takes care of all these functions.  Since
I became acquainted with Loglan, the idea of distinguishing
between nouns and adjectives (which Esperanto seems to) in
artificial language seems superfluous to me.  In a recent article
here, someone gave an example context in a creole language where
an adjective or verb could be inserted.  That example encourages
the hope that grammatical distinctions among words with extrlingual
import (nouns, verbs, etc.) are not necessary.

Posters have said Esperanto is easy to learn.  Being easy to
learn was one of the original design goals of Loglan.  I hope
the next public version exhibits this desired ease.  I don't
know whether it will be as easy as Esperanto.

One of the ways Loglan tries to be easy to learn is by using
the eight most known natural languages as sources for sounds
for root words.  The proportion of people in the world who
know each contributing language determines the proportion of
that language's contribution to Loglan roots.  The two largest
contributors are Mandarin and English in that order.  I think
the vast majority of Loglan root words ("Loglan primitives",
i. e., predicate words that are not made from other Loglan
words) get their sounds from no other source than Mandarin and
English.

As an example of how I, an English-speaker with a little
French, can recognize natural language roots in a Loglan word
(thus making the word easier to remember), we have English
"green", French "vert", Loglan "vegri".  "I am greener than
you." -> "Mi na vegri tu".

Jack  (la Djek in Loglan)