Loglan, to the best of my knowledge, was originally created to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and find out if thinking in an unambiguous, logically structured language entails logically structured thinking. I don’t really have any idea whether that was ever actually tested, but I’m skeptical regarding the whole idea.
That said, I somehow find myself fascinated by the notion of constructed languages that don’t have all the baggage of naturally evolved ones. Plus, I think it might be a fun intellectual exercise to try and learn something like this. So I was wondering, besides the exercise, is there any good reason for learning lojban? Is there a community of speakers? Has the idea of using it to bridge the gap between natural and programming languages come to anything? Or is the whole thing just a pointless nerdy exercise?
I read James Cooke Brown’s Loglan books when I was in college, strictly as a pointless nerdy exercise. I found it incredibly fascinating and some of the discussion is quite useful for understanding how languages work in general, not just for understanding Loglan (for example, there’s a discussion about what the definite article means, in languages that have one). Brown’s insistence that Loglan was his property, not be misused (or even used) by others eventually doomed that language. I know less about Lojban or its current status, but when I looked into it a decade or so ago, it seemed a much more fully realized language with a (probaby small) community of speakers.
I don’t think either language is or will ever be useful in talking to computers. Back in the 1960s it was thought that the complex grammar of natural languages would be an impediment to a computer’s ability to understand spoken language, but that’s now understood not to be a primary issue. There are much harder issues in things like knowledge of the real world and allusions to common human shared experience as opposed to parsing ambiguous grammatical constructions.
There’s no logical reason to learn loglan or lojban, no. They’re interesting and amusing if you’re into conlangs, but that’s best approached as simply a hobby, something done for amusement and the art of the thing, as opposed to attempting to use a language to change the world. That time has come and gone, and likely never was to begin with, if approached in the cold light of reason.
But the idea wasn’t to “change the world” (you are thinking of Esperanto, which a few people do actually speak). What was the fate of the logical-thinking hypothesis, also controlling for variables and measuring subjects’ performance on logical tasks versus working in French, Chinese, etc.?
I’d say that two million Esperanto speakers is more than “a few”, but it’s certainly a small community compared to the major natural languages. It’s true that Brown did not intend Loglan to be a widely useful language. The introduction to Loglan I says
And goes on to say, sufficiently verbosely enough that I’m getting tired of quoting him, that if Sapir-Whorf turns out to be correct then we should build a language that enhances many aspects of human thought, not just logical thought. Loglan was just intended to be a lab instrument to test the theory.
Thanks for everybody’s input, so far. I think I’ll try and maybe dip my foot into it, although I’ve also been thinking about having a look at Toki Pona. (Does anybody have any experience there?)
Do you know what the best introductory material for Lojban would be? Would it make sense to start with Brown’s books, or is there little common ground overall?
I’d also be very interested in this. Has there been any actual scientific testing of this idea? The difficulty of finding any firm statements here seems to indicate that if there was, its findings weren’t really in favor of Loglan/Lojban, or else you’d expect people using it for advertising…
I’d suggest The Complete Lojban Language by John W. Cowan. It is a user-friendly (to the extent that learning Lojban can be preented in a user-friendly way at all) grammar reference work and text book, starting with the very basics and then increasing complexity gradually as it goes along. I must admit I never completed the book because each time I gave it a start, I gave up along the way - the linguistic concepts simply get so different from the natural languages we’re used to. Lojban words are more logical operators than words in the traditional sense. But I suppose if you’re interested and willing to put in the time and effort, then this book can take you there.
I trued to learn Loglan back in the 70s. Got no further than trying to learn Esperanto, Klingon, French, or any other human language. Not sure how I teached myself English this good.
I suspect that it’s just as possible to use Loglan imprecisely or illogically as it is for any other language. Such usage in Loglan would be “incorrect”, but it would still be done, if anyone actually spoke it.
That’s an interesting question. There are certain types of ambiguity that can occur in English that really cannot occur in Loglan because the language has no imprecise structure corresponding to the English one. For example, a sentence cannot have an ambiguous parsing analogous to “Charging bull injures farmer with ax” because there is no ambiguous conjunction like the English “with” that makes this possible. The two possible Loglan translations would be unambiguous as to who had the ax. Of course, a speaker could say one sentence when he actually meant the other one, but that’s not the same as the language itself admitting two interpretations.
Similarly, it’s not possible to have an ambiguous pronoun reference like “John told Peter that he failed the exam”. Loglan pronouns are unambiguous as to which noun they refer to.
On the other hand, the Loglan philosophy is explicit that the meaning of a modifier-modified expression is not derivable from the underlying words. So “bicycle pump” could legitimately mean many things (an air pump for bicycle tires as usual, or a machine for pumping bicycles into something) and speakers must have an implicit agreement about what such expressions mean.
That seems more useful to make communication between people less ambiguous, as opposed to helping the internal thought process that isn’t communicating externally.
I know this gets at the original theory, but the limit of thinking that seems to cause issues like these (keeping track of who was carrying the ax) appears to be more related to the size of working memory than the fact that our language for communicating externally allows for ambiguous constructions.
