Over the years, a few falsehoods have made the rounds
about Loglan. These are some I've seen on-line.
Loglan is a computer language.
It seems that there is, in
fact, a computer language used in Europe that is named "Loglan", but
it's unrelated. I don't know anything about it.
It is true that Loglan is
designed to be avoid certain things that make traditional languages
hard for computers to understand.
Loglan is just one more attempt to build a better Esperanto.
No. Although some Loglan
enthusiasts promote Loglan as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL)
like Esperanto, and although it does actually offer some advantages
that way (it is much less Euro-centric than most of the pack), it was
not designed for that purpose. It was designed as a research tool, and
as, in fact, the world's first experimental language.
Loglan has two hundred
rules of grammar where Esperanto has only sixteen.
This one's for the
terminally clueless. Loglan has, it is true, about two hundred rules of
grammar, but those are rules at a level of precision sufficient for a
computer to parse it. The 'sixteen rules' of Esperanto, on the other
hand -- well, to begin with, they aren't sixteen; several of them are
really two rules in one. But, more to the point, these rules are
utterly incomplete; they assume as a starting point a
middle-of-the-road European grammar, and even then they only cover
things that traditional European grammarians deal with. I am not aware
of any attempt to build a computer grammar for Esperanto, but it's a
safe bet that it would have around ten or twenty thousand rules, just
like English and all natural languages.
If Loglan has two hundred
rules, Esperanto has thousands. If Esperanto has sixteen rules, Loglan
has none.
Loglan was conceived to be a logical language.
Yes and no. The original
purpose was to provide an experimental apparatus to test the famous
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that what we can think depends on
the language we think in. For that purpose, it had to be an extreme
language in some way. It was decided to make it extremely logical because logic is well
understood, clearly related to language ("logic" comes from the Greek
word "λογος" ("logos"), meaning "word"), and easy to test.
So Loglan was indeed
designed as a Logical language,
but that was secondary to its original aim of being an unusual language.
Loglan is a return to 17th-18th
century attempts to build a "universal sign".
Not particularly. Loglan
relies more than most natural languages do on words built from simpler
words, but every serious attempt to build a working artificial language
does the same thing, because it vastly simplifies the work of creating
a learnable vocabulary.
Loglan is now named Lojban.
Some years ago, certain
people involved with Loglan split off and started their own program and
their own language. I wasn't around at the time, and I don't know much
about what happened, but the fact is that Lojban and Loglan are two
different languages, driven by two different groups, and I wish the
Lojban people would stop confusing the issue.
It isn't; it's a non-profit. It does charge for its books and software, but seeing that
there's no good fairy bankrolling them, that shouldn't be a big surprise.