From pycyn@aol.com Wed Apr 26 15:06:14 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 6731 invoked from network); 26 Apr 2000 22:06:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 26 Apr 2000 22:06:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO q8.egroups.com) (10.1.2.31) by mta1 with SMTP; 26 Apr 2000 22:06:13 -0000 Received: (qmail 28435 invoked from network); 26 Apr 2000 22:06:13 -0000 Received: from imo20.mx.aol.com (152.163.225.10) by mx3.egroups.com with SMTP; 26 Apr 2000 22:06:13 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo20.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v26.7.) id a.d0.4fe993d (4574) for ; Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:06:05 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:06:04 EDT Subject: FAQ: What is the difference between Loglan and Lojban? To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows sub 33 From: pycyn@aol.com I need this vetted before I can go on with another summary: additions, subtractions, total revisions? tone? tune? First, what is the same? Both derive from the work of the late Dr. James Cooke Brown, beginning about 1955 and first published in a 1960 Scientific American. In the late 1980s, they separated. Loglan is being continually developed by The Loglan Institute, essentially Dr. Brown and an ever changing group of volunteers around him. Lojban was developed and base-lined by the Logical Language Group, Bob LeChevalier, John Cowan, and a growing group of volunteers who interact over the internet. Lojban thus begins with the state of Loglan in about 1986 and was developed to meet the specs of that language more adequately. Loglan grew from that same base in a more personal way, meeting new ideals as they occurred to Dr. Brown over the years. As noted, Lojban has a complete base-lined grammar and vocabulary and has had for nearly a decade; Loglan does not have any complete versions and is constitutionally open to constant modification. Their common heritage is a grammar based upon an applied second order predicate logic with identity and descriptions. In both this base has been modified to allow full conversational capacity: questions, commands, expressions of emotion, hypothetical claims, and so on. It has also been modified in the direction of conversational efficiency: complex sentences can be reduced to complex parts, pronouns function across sentence boundaries, second order features are reduced to first order (predicates used as arguments become terms so that second order predicates appear as first order), and a variety of "abbreviations" (from the point of view of logical notation) are used, pretty much the same in both languages. The fundamental content vocabulary, the primitive predicates, of both langauges are restricted to the same patterns in both (CCVCV or CVCCV) and are constructed by an algorithm that is aimed at maximizing the recognizability of the word to most speakers by combining patterns from the corresponding words in the major languages of the world. The sounds of the two languages are almost exactly the same, though somewhat differently represented. For the most part, the meanings of the basic words are the same, defined by a basic idea and a place structure for arranging one to five arguments around within that idea. Some of the ideas are different and the arrangement of terms is often changed in the later places, but there remains a high degree of comparability here. The rules for making new predicates from the primitives are pretty much the same at the basic level, with some differences (reflecting also differences in orthography) in more complex cases. The rest of the fundamental vocabulary: logical words and emotional, and other expressive forms and devices for collapsing logical complexities follow similar patterns in the two langages, but differ markedly in detail -- both in what forms occur in each type and in the exact grammatical details of the forms. Generally, Lojban has been more prolific in each area and has more detailed grammatical definitions of each class. The miost immediately obvious difference between the two, perhaps, is in the fundamental vocabulary. Because Lojban was constructed when TLI claimed a copyright on the shape of the words, the non- content vocabulary is almost totally different, even when there is an exact match in meaning. The content words are also almost always different, in this case not only to avoid copyright problems but because the algorithm for forming words was applied to a different set of languages, with different weights (the major languages in order in 1980 rather than 1950) and occasionally with a different selection of the best word from a langauge to represent a concept. In addition, the need for forms to be used in constructing compound was built into the algorithm for Lojban in the beginning but added in Loglan too late to affect most primitives. The upshot of all this is probably that, although a Lojban and a Loglan translation of a passage would appear very different on the surface, there is a pretty regular -- if not quite automatic -- procedure for turning one into the other. Since the Loglan grammar is neither complete nor publicly available, it is not quite clear whether this is completely true, but it clearly is for a great part of the langauge. It is also probably the case that the Loglan to Lojban translations are slightly easier than the reverse because of the greater variety of conversational words in Lojban, which may require special treatment in turning into Loglan.