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From: urban@spp2.UUCP (Mike Urban)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Artificial Language (Loglan and Esperanto) (sorta long)
Message-ID: <841@spp2.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-Jan-86 12:15:52 EST
Article-I.D.: spp2.841
Posted: Mon Jan  6 12:15:52 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Jan-86 06:43:49 EST
References: <2685@sjuvax.UUCP> <886@rlgvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: urban@spp2.UUCP (Mike Urban)
Distribution: net
Organization: TRW, Redondo Beach  CA
Lines: 72

In article <886@rlgvax.UUCP> jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh) writes:
>> 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.
>
I have studied both Loglan and Esperanto, and I think that
saying that Loglan is "better" than Esperanto is misleading.
The stated purpose for Esperanto is international
communication, simplicity of grammar, and recognition of
vocabulary.  The stated purpose for Loglan is to test the Whorf
hypothesis that language shapes thought.  Thus, it is
UNdesirable for Loglan to have a vocabulary that strongly
resembles any particular language (as Esperanto resembles the
Romance family), since that reduces the degree of isolation in
which the hypothesized Whorf effects can be studied.
Similarly, Esperanto contains many cases of lexical ambiguity
(also known as puns) because it was not considered worthwhile
to chase down every possible ambiguity, and because it allows
for certain modes of poetic expression.  Loglan, with its
expressed goal of being an unamibiguous, logical language,
cannot preserve this feature of "natural" language.

While Loglan's vocabulary may be "recognizable" (if you can
recognize "vegri" as "green"), its grammar is rather difficult
to learn directly, especially for speakers of Indo-european
languages.  To translate "I want to buy a car", you have to
first decide whether you mean "there exists an x such that x is
a car and I want to buy x" or "I want to buy one element of the
car class".  Even the stated example (mi na vegri tu) is not
the correct translation of what would usually be meant by "I am
greener than you", since the "timeless" tense (mi vegri tu)
is probably more appropriate than the present tense (I am
currently greener than you).  Not particularly easy or simple.

Finally, the (admittedly modest) success of Esperanto is a
demonstration that "a priori" considerations of "modern
linguistics" seem to be less important than an intuitive sense
of sound and meaning.  As J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out ("A Secret
Vice"), one of Esperanto's better features is that it was
designed by a single man, rather than a committee.  Later
attempts to improve on the Esperanto model according to "modern
linguistic" ideas (Ido, Interlingua, Novial, Interglossa...)
have been failures for this reason.  It sounds illogical, but
because Esperanto is, in part, a work of "art", it has a "soul"
that is lacking in the other projects.  Why this should be
important might make a useful area for study.  Actually,
there's a PhD dissertation on the Esperanto Movement from a
sociological perspective that I intend to read someday.

And just to clarify, I think that Loglan is an extremely
interesting language: the only language I know of that is
syntactically and lexically unambiguous and whose domain of
discourse is the real world.  Learning Loglan, I feel, *does*
allow one to expand the way one thinks about language and
thought, and I recommend it to people interested in language
and/or philosophy.  You really have to think about what you
mean when you say something in Loglan, and it'd be fun to try
to translate a bureaucrat's wordy jargon-filled memo into
Loglan!  So by all means, examine Loglan.  I just feel that it
is misleading to represent it as a "competitor" to Esperanto.
-- 

   Mike Urban
	{ucbvax|decvax}!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban 

"You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"