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This edition is double the size of the Third Edition and reflects the re-engineering of Loglan that took place between 1975 and 1989, a research program participated in by the hundreds of active loglanists who assembled around the language after the 1975 publications. Part of the increase in size of this new edition is due to the fact that it has some 60 pages of word-lists, while the Third Edition had but a single glossary of 16 pages. The reason for the inclusion of these new and bulkier word-lists is that this edition, unlike its predecessor, must stand alone. The 1975 edition was accompanied by the then-freshly revised Second Edition of our dictionaries, Loglan 4 & 5, also published in 1975. But in the last half dozen years the Loglan word-makers have been very active. Since 1975 the lexicon of Loglan has more than doubled in size. In particular, it has grown from around 4,000 terms then to more than 9,000 terms, and at present rates of growth there could well be 12,000 terms in our dictionary files by the time the Third Edition of our dictionary is ready to be printed. While all these new lexical materials are safely stored on The Institute's computers, where they may be--and often are--augmented, The Institute does not yet have the editorial staff to build a bilingual dictionary which is three or even two times the size of our present one. Dictionary-work is by far the most labor-intensive, and therefore the most costly, work we do. lt is hoped that with the publication of this Fourth Edition we will grow sufficiently both in numbers and in revenues in the next few years to make the expansion and publication of a new bilingual dictionary of 10,000 or 15,000 Loglan terms the next large project of The Loglan Institute.
In the meantime, Loglan 1 must, as I say, stand alone. It must not only serve the user as a resource book on the grammar, morphology, and usages of the new language, but also as a tool with which to update and freely add to the old dictionary. By including complete lists of primitives and affixes in this volume, I have tried to make it possible for the buyer of this book who also owns a copy of the 1975 dictionary to update the latter on demand. For example, suppose such a user were to look up the 1975 word for 'understand'. He or she would find the so-called "complex" word sadja with sanpa djano ("sign-know") listed as its "deriving metaphor". The user could safely assume that the metaphor was still valid. So using Appendix B of this volume, the user would find that saa- and -dja were among the new affixes of sanpa and djano, and they could then be confidently combined to produce the new Loglan word for 'understand', namely saadid (pronounced "sah-AHD-ja"). Moreover, by following the rules given in this book, all users will arrive at this result.
The language has grown in all its other departments as well. Usages in particular have multiplied. Loglan morphology, too, is now better understood; and so its exposition has grown. Above all, Loglan grammar is now a much more flexible Instrument than it was in 1975 as well as a completely conflict-free one; so there are now many more ways of using it. As a consequence of these additions to the language, nearly all the chapters of the Third Edition have had to be considerably expanded. The only exceptions are the Foreword, which though supplemented with a new historical addendum has been otherwise left intact, and Chapter 7, which is entirely new. In the latter I discuss for the first time publically a detailed program for testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with Loglan. This project may still be some years away. But it may well be time for the present generation of loglanists to prepare themselves for their crucial roles in it.
J.C.B
Gainesville
April, 1989
This work is a revision and abridgement of the Second Edition published on microfilm in 1969 (University Microfilms Catalogue No. S-398, Ann Arbor, Michigan). Virtually no grammatical changes have taken place in the language since that date but a system of "implicit quantification" has been introduced with the object of making certain logically complex expressions speakable, and these have occasioned certain minor changes in the usage-patterns of the language. The new usages will be found in Section 3.16 in Chapter 3 (4.16 in the earlier edition), Sections 4.21 and 4.24 (formerly 5.21 and 5.24), Sections 5.9, 5.11, 5.16-18 and 5.22 (6.9, 6.11, 6.16-18 and 6.21), and Section 5.21 is new. As the preparation of this edition was undertaken after the 1972-74 revision of the dictionary had been completed, Chapter 6 on Words and Growth has been almost entirely rewritten to accommodate the new lexical materials; in particular, Sections 6.2-4 are new. Chapter 7 of the Second Edition on Uses and Prospects has been eliminated in this edition both for reasons of space and because some of those prospects have been realized. For example, it is now clear that Loglan is a speakable language. It is therefore reasonable to hope that the publication of this Third Edition together with a newly augmented edition of the dictionary (Loglan 4 & 5) will make possible the experimental work for which the language was originally designed. Those wishing to participate in this work may communicate with the Institute through either of the addresses given on the title page.
J. C. B.
Ibiza
April, 1975
Substantial portions of this work have been published in a First Edition issued by the Loglan Institute in 1966. The present work is a revision and augmentation of that earlier one. In particular, the Foreword, Chapters 1 and 2, and Sections 4.7, 5.12, 5.23-24, 6.18 and the Notes are new; Chapter 3 has been omitted; and Sections 5.10, 5.18, 5.21-22 (5.17, 5.20- 21 in the earlier edition), 6.8, 6.16-17, 6.19 and 6.21 (6.18 and 6.20) have been substantially revised. Except for the systematic distinction now drawn between the "afterthought" and "forethought" modes of connection, the structure of the language is essentially unchanged.
J. C. B.
Gainesville
March, 1969
This edition of some several hundred copies is meant to be distributed to several kinds of readers: (1) those who have corresponded with me about Loglan over the years since the publication of the Scientific American article in 1960; (2) those among the readers of several journals who have responded with interest to a recent announcement of the project; and (3) a handful of scholars whom vie have expressly invited to examine one feature or another of Loglan in advance of publication. Our motives in preparing such a prepublication edition are threefold:
First, Loglan purports to be a logical language. We should like to give logicians an opportunity to inform us where, and in what respects, Loglan as it stands is not. Then, in consequence of the revision that will be enabled by their criticism, the published version of the language will have a better chance of fulfilling this broad claim.
Second, this book in particular purports to be a popular introduction to Loglan, meant to engage a substantial proportion of its readers in such further study as may lead, in some of them at least, to active mastery of the language. Languages, however, are more than commonly complex affairs. One does not succeed in writing simply about a complex thing solely by deciding to do so. Again, I should like to be told where I have failed.
Third, interest in Loglan among academics--once very lively--has all but died. Six years of silence after the publication of a set of prolegomena does not fit the temper of the times. I frankly hope in this semi-private publication to stir that interest up again. For without academic support the publication of the other Loglan manuscripts--and there are several--is likely to be delayed for some time.
Over the years since the publication of those prolegomena several thousand pages of manuscript have been prepared. There are two dictionaries (English-Loglan and Loglan-English, the first with 12,000, the second with 3000 entries); there is a programmed textbook equivalent to about a semester of college work; and there is a major portion of a technical treatise on the linguistical aspects of the subject in addition to the computer programs and working papers not primarily meant for publication. To a serious student of the language none of these books will be worth much without the others.
Moreover all of them have waited for a suitable introduction, which it has been my purpose in the present volume to provide.
Of all the academic interests that bear on Loglan it is the linguistic interest that is least well-served by the present book. Linguistical matters--being in the main descriptions of the unconscious features of the language act--are far more difficult to deal with popularly than logical ones. Everyone knows at least a little about how he thinks; hardly anyone knows anything about how he talks. Because this book will, in published form, be addressed primarily to the general reader, I have therefore sidestepped linguistic issues wherever I could, planning to treat the most important of them in appendices in subsequent editions of the work. 1 This has meant ignoring the concerns of the linguist almost entirely in this book, especially as in this preprint edition it is virtually stripped of appendices. But the linguist will take some comfort I hope in knowing that another volume in this series is addressed exclusively to him.2
In short, there are two kinds of questions one can ask about Loglan. The first is, Is it a language? The second is, Is it a logical language? This book deals only with the second question; for it takes an affirmative answer to the first for granted. Yet the first contains the germ of a very interesting scientific question: Can a language of any kind be built? I hope this brief foreword will apprise the scientific reader that I am not unalert to the importance of this question. But it turns out that one cannot describe a language attractively to its eventual speakers by dwelling on the question of whether they exist.
J. C. B.
Paris
March, 1966
1 The appendices growing out of my correspondence over the First Edition became a second book, Loglan 2: Methods of Conststuction originally published on microfilm (Brown (1969a) but later published serially in the first and second volumes of The Loglanist, 1976-78.
2 Loglan 2, but now not quite "exclusively", as aspects of Loglan of interest to computer scientists are also discussed in this book.