Loglan

Beginning about 1955, Dr. [James Cooke Brown]? began work on Loglan, an artificial language designed for linguistic research, particularly investigation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He intended it to be as culturally neutral as possible, different from any existing human language (even other artificial ones), and totally regular and unambiguous. The language's grammar is based on predicate logic (the name is short for "logical language"), which also makes it particularly suitable for human-computer communication, an application that led Robert Heinlein to mention the language in his novel [The Moon is a Harsh Mistress]?.

He founded [The Loglan Institute]? to develop the language and other applications of it. Dr. Brown always considered the language a research project that was never complete, so although he released many papers about its design he never "released" it to become a usable language. A group of his followers later formed [The Logical Language Group]? to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. This latter group has a small but active community of speakers.

Links

• [The Loglan Institute home page]
• [The Logical Language Group home page]