Loglan – a predicate logic-based language for humans

I think this should mention Lojban. The spin off with a larger community.<p>In my younger yearsi tried to learn some Lojban. But it was hard. The extreme regularity and brevity of the vocabulary made it difficult to remember words. Also the grammar has a lot of features, special particles allow for flipping word order. Such stuff is actually very confusing.<p>What i really liked about it is that it allows you to phrase things as precise or as vague as you intend.

I&#x27;ve always had an interest in invented languages and spent some time lurking the conlang&#x2F;worldlang&#x2F;auxlang communities. They are a very eccentric and confrontational bunch of people, to put it mildly<p>The most interesting auxlang project I ever came across was Unish (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Unish" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Unish</a>), mainly because it is the only one I know of created at a university by trained linguists. It&#x27;s word selection was highly methodical (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unish.net&#x2F;introduce&#x2F;e_unish_Word.jsp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unish.net&#x2F;introduce&#x2F;e_unish_Word.jsp</a>) unlike most invented languages which are based on the personal tastes of the inventor.<p>Check out the book <i>In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent</i> for a fun and interesting look at the whole topic.

Loglan was for research purposes, IIRC. For actual usage, what little exists, it’s largely supplanted by Lojban.

There is also one more interesting specimen - Ithkuil[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ithkuil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ithkuil</a>

The 2015 HN discussion of Loglan [0] included links to XKCD [1] and its debunking [2].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10075196" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10075196</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;191&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;191&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mw.lojban.org&#x2F;papri&#x2F;File:xkcd_comic_debunker.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mw.lojban.org&#x2F;papri&#x2F;File:xkcd_comic_debunker.png</a>

This Slate Star Codex post has more substance for its non-existent philosophical language than all of Loglan&#x2F;lojban. It is a controversial statement but I’ll stand by it:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;06&#x2F;raikoth-laws-language-and-society&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;06&#x2F;raikoth-laws-language-a...</a><p>There is a lot of very interesting things that could be done with a human language that had a precise function mapping 1:1 utterances to semantics, which syntactically required specifying source of knowledge and uncertainty, and supported strongly typed noun phrase constructions.<p>Unfortunately that’s not loglan. The only thing loglan rigorously defines was the syntax and morphology, which ironically is basically a solved problem for natural languages today. Context is all you need to parse a sentence as well as a human, or better, and rigorously defining context was explicitly excluded from the scope of loglan&#x2F;lojban :(

first thing that came to my head was <i>Newspeak</i>