Welcome to Loglan.org

Loglan is an artificial human language originally designed/invented by James Cooke Brown in the late 1950's. He worked on it for many years with the help and input of many volunteers.

James Cooke Brown in Beijing, April 1994
picture of three men

What's New

For Beginners

  1. What is Loglan? A short description of Loglan and its origins. This is the flyer that The Loglan Institute mails to people who inquire.
  2. Vizka La Spat A short bit of text with a detailed explaination for those who have never seen Loglan before.
  3. Easy Loglan: An Introduction for Beginners by Alex Leith. His idea was to pare Loglan down to an easy-to-learn, essential core. (A more technical description of his method is to come.)
  4. Loglan 3 by Steve Rice, our basic Loglan primer, is now available in Adobe Acrobat format as shareware. This is a revised edition that replaces the partial HTML version that was previously available here.

Available Study Materials

  1. The basic textbook, Loglan 1, is now online. You may read it from this web site, download the HTML as a zip file (800K), or download an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file (4.4Meg). This is the revised 4th edition, just like the paper 1989 edition but with all known errors corrected.
  2. Readings from Loglan 1, the Loglan Language learning cassettes that The Loglan Institute has been selling, are now available for download.
  3. Loglan 3 by Steve Rice, our basic Loglan primer, is available in Adobe Acrobat format as shareware.
  4. The Loglan to English, and English to Loglan dictionaries, (known as Loglan 4 & 5), are available as searchable HTML documents. Download and uncompress the zip archive (1.5 Meg), and then read the files with your favorite browser. (HTML 4 preferred.)
  5. A Loglan-English dictionary is available as Java based software.
  6. Appendix A of Loglan 1 is a list of Loglan little words. Bill Gober has created an updated version. It is available either sorted by word or sorted by lexeme.
  7. Loglan Paradigms has been updated by Mike Demoulin. This is a handy reference to the basic features of the language, which originally appeared in the (now out of date) paper dictionary Loglan 4&5.
  8. Robert McIvor has compiled the notes written by James Cooke Brown and Alex Leith while preparing the novel First Visit to Loglandia, the first part of which appeared in La Logli.
  9. Notebook 3: The Present State of The Loglan Language was the most complete description of Loglan available in 1987. It is now available as a set of scanned .pdf files. (Download Part I, Part II, or Part III — They are 5-6 Megabytes each.)

Sample Texts

  1. Vizka La Spat
    For those who have never seen Loglan before.
  2. A Cartoon in Loglan by Rex May.
  3. Lo Logla Plipursei
    A simple original Loglan composition about the pain of memorization.
  4. Ne Clina Fora
    A four line poem from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1st Ed.. Translation by Robert McIvor and friends.
  5. Na Lepo Mi Pa Hirti Le Cirflo Tarsenmao
    A Walt Whitman poem, translated by James Cooke Brown.
  6. Ne Dristu Je La Helas
    A humorous, true story about traveling in Greece, by Robert McIvor.
  7. Ne Rorlensia
    A humorous, true story about languages, with a collegiate setting.
  8. Ne Logle Po Lerbatmi
    Some correspondence about Loglan in Loglan, between the Two Jameses.
  9. Le Fidsesmao Kamkystu
    A funny story about Physicists as told by Dr. Leon Lederman. Translation by JCB.
  10. Le Fidsesmao Kamkystu Lerci
    A letter, in Loglan, which comments on the funny story about Physicists.
  11. Ne Tradu Stuci
    A true story about U.S.-Korean relations, by Kirk Sattley.
  12. La Nu Stucue Je La Mioskun (The Dormouse’s Story)
    A passage from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
  13. A Selection From Sophie's World
    An excerpt from the philosophical novel Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder. Translation by Alex Leith.
  14. Nepo Neri Vizgoi La Loglandias (A First Visit to Loglandia)
    A story about someone traveling to a Loglan-speaking country, by Alex Leith.
  15. Notes on Nepo Neri Vizgoi La Loglandias (A First Visit to Loglandia)
    Robert McIvor has compiled the notes generated by James Cooke Brown and Alex Leith while preparing the novel First Visit to Loglandia, the first part of which appeared in La Logli. Notes for each chapter are posted, along with the original Loglan and English texts.

Articles

  1. The Many Faces of Gu
    An explanation of gu and its kin, by Robert McIvor.
  2. How to use Abstractions
    Advice on how to use po, pu, and zo.
  3. Complex-Making in Loglan
    Some rules of thumb used for making many Loglan compound words, by Robert McIvor.
  4. Logic and Economy
    An essay on the nature of language.
  5. Lo Cejnoa (Trends)
    An enthusiastic essay on the future of Loglan. Has lots of example text.
  6. Towards a Theory of Case Tags
    A speculative essay on Loglan's optional case-tag system and how it relates to language in general.
  7. Subjunctive Junction: Articles that relate to the counterfactual/subjunctive debate.
  8. Sets and Multiples and Sets and Masses
    Two essays on collectives such as sets, multiples, and masses, by JCB.
  9. Abstract for Loglan and the Option of Clarity: A Genuinely User-friendly Language For Humans and Their Machines, by Reed Riner. Alas, we cannot post the full article here for copyright reasons, but you can easily request it from the author by e-mail. It's about 35K.
  10. Identity Predicates and MEX, by Emerson Mitchell.
    A gritty discussion of the requirements of a Mathematical Expression grammar, with extensive comments by JCB.
  11. Alex Leith wrote two articles on Easy Loglan: A Provisional Description, an outline of the idea, and An Introduction for Beginners, an example lesson.

Regular Columns from Lognet

A List of Lognet Articles

Many of the articles at Loglan.org were originally published in The Loglan Institute's newsletter Lognet. This list of the contents of each issue of Lognet has links to the main articles available here, as well as to additional articles of more historical interest. (More links will be added as time permits.)

Miscellaneous

  1. Some people are meeting roughly once a week to practice "speaking" (typing, actually, so far) in the online environment Second Life. If you would like to participate, you can join the "Loglan Conversation Group" (within Second Life) and send a message to Leslie Beaumont (aka Randall Holmes). Meetings have generally been on Saturday or Sunday at 9:00 am PDT. Each week's meeting is announced on the mailing list.
  2. For Programmers: The Loglan Institute is making the source code for its various software products available for download.
  3. Vyatcheslav Ivanov has written a Loglan web page with sections in both Russian and Esperanto. You'll need a Cyrillic font to read the Russian parts.
  4. The Machine Grammar
    This is the yacc source for the Loglan parser. If you don't know what "yacc" is, you probably don't need this. ('yacc' stands for "yet another compiler compiler". It's a tool that programmers use for writing software that parses text files.) This is "Trial 80" of the grammar from 1994 -- not the most recent but it's a good starting point.
  5. "Where are they now?" department. In the 1970s, Sheldon Linker created the first machine grammar for Loglan. More recently, he's written software which he says, "I can talk to, and get well-reasoned answers back from." It's not Loglan, but a special form of English which Sheldon calls "JCB-English", named after our founder. There is more information on his website.
  6. Rex May's cartoons which appeared in the pages of Lognet have been collected here.
  7. For Macintosh users: Your Mac can actually speak Loglan for you with our highly experimental Loglan Text To Speech page. Alas, it doesn't work as well as it used to, but this could be a starting point for a proper text-to-speech engine.
  8. Information on Other Constructed Languages
  9. Our CEO, Randall Holmes, has a personal Loglan page.

Loglan Sightings

Contact Information

More official information on Loglan is available from:

THE LOGLAN INSTITUTE, INC.
A Non-Profit Research Corporation
c/o Jennifer Brown
1701 N.E. 75 St.
Gainesville, FL 32641
U.S.A.
Phone: (352) 378-5655

Informal questions and comments about Loglan or about the content of these pages can be directed to the author of this page at: djeimz AT megaseattle DOT com

Mailing List

There is also an electronic mailing list for general discussion and answering the questions of beginning Loglanists.
You can subscribe at the mailing list's web page.

This list is often rather quiet, but people are listening. So if you have a question, speak up.