Garrett's Links to Logical Constructed Languages (original) (raw)
(also known as loglangs)
all links checked 1/17/04
last modified 1/19/04
Loglan/Lojban & Reforms:
Loglan, by James Cooke Brown
Lojban, "a realization of Loglan", by the Logical Language Group
Loglan is an artificial human language originally designed/invented by James Cooke Brown in the late 1950's. He has worked on it ever since with the help and input of many volunteers. Loglan/Lojban is a language designed for several purposes, including linguistics research (especially involving a proposed test of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis), foreign language instruction, artificial intelligence research, machine translation and related human/computer interaction applications, and as a stimulating educational and entertaining mental exercise. Some people are interested in Lojban as a prospective international auxiliary language. An international community of aficionados has appeared, writing in and about the language, primarily on the Internet. Loglan was the original; Lojban is a version created by an offshoot committee of people.
Ceqli, by Rex May
Ceqli began as an attempt to reform Loglan and make it more user-friendly. Since that beginning, it has departed more and more from Loglan, and has become a language based on Mandarin grammar with roots from everywhere.
Gua\spi, by Jim Carter
A descendent of Lojban and Loglan which uses Chinese-like tones to mark grammatical structure. There is a dictionary and other informational files in Jim Carter's Gua\spi directory. By using tones instead of structure words, and cutting predicates from two to one syllable, Carter has fixed a minor flaw in Gua\spi's predecessors -- they take a lot of syllables to say things.
Lojsk, by Ari Reyes
Lojsk is an absolutely regular, simple and logical 'Predicate Based' language. It is influenced heavily by: Loglan, Lojban, Universal Networking Language (UNL), Esperanto, Visual Basic, Dutton's Speedwords, Ceqli and Gua\spi.
Voksigid, by Bruce R. Gilson
"Voksigid was an attempt to construct a predicate language of a different type from those which had gone before. The first predicate language (Loglan, developed by James Cooke Brown), and its descendant Lojban, developed by Robert LeChevalier, both used word order to mark the various places in the predication. I felt that remembering which position meant which role in the predication might be beyond easy memorization for most people. I assembled a development committee in 1991, and for several months we worked on the language, which we named Voksigid. The language has a syntax which was somewhat influenced by Japanese (but reversed; Japanese is verb-last and postpositional, Voksigid is verb-first and prepositional), and a vocabulary based mostly on European language roots."
Other Logical Languages:
AllNoun, by Tom Breton
Originally it was an experiment to see if language could be made that simple. Since it has been largely technically successful, it's purpose now is to support any advantages that can be obtained with a maximally simple grammar. AllNoun has only one part of speech, which is largely but not entirely analogous to nouns in other languages. Thus the name AllNoun.
Danov�n and Arov�n, by J. J. Shinavier
Danov�n (literally "language of logic") is the strictly unambiguous form of Arov�n, the "language of thought" (which is the language most of this web site has to do with). Arov�n is, so far as we can speak of any language as being "complete", a complete *constructed* human language (or, in the local Net jargon, a "conlang") which is built to be an ideal medium for clear, precise communication of abstract ideas, as well as to serve the ordinary "natlang" purposes of everyday speech. Arov�n is "natural" in an altogether different way than languages which have evolved with a large speakership -- while these languages have *hundreds or thousands of years* of history behind them during which they've been free to adapt to suit the needs of their speakers, Arov�n is intrinsically natural in that it parallels and merges with human thought patterns used in higher reasoning and the constant ordering of perceptions and the structure we build with them, inferred reality. This website will introduce you to the basics patterns of the language, as well as what it looks and sounds like, its history, and a few simple texts.
Ithkuil, by John Quijada
Ithkuil is a cross between an a priori philosophical language and a logical language. It is by no means intended to function as a �natural� human language - it exists as an exercise in how human languages_could_ function, not as human languages do function. Ithkuil is an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language. Ithkuil represents the culmination of over twenty-five years of personal effort toward creating such a language.
Kel, by Robert Jung
Kel is a logical language that aims to eliminate all ambiguity, irregularity, and idiomatic usage of language. It has a minimalist phonology and a very regular morphology and syntax with powerful derivational and semantically precise compounding systems.
Liva, by Claudio T. Gnoli
Liva is constructed mainly for fun. It has no practical aim. It is conceived as a very unambiguous and logical language, at all its levels. Liva has an original writing system, which trys to replicate the phonetic features of speech. Vocabulary has not yet been created, except for some word used in examples of syntactic structures.
Livagian, by And Rosta (no link)
Minyeva, by Garrett Jones
Minyeva is a systematic conlang designed to reflect the underlying semantics of sentences with more regularity than natural languages. This means that words will not have multiple meanings, and there won't be synonyms.
Nasendi, by Richard Morneau
Nasendi is an artificial language designed specifically for use as an interlingua in machine translation. This language is designed to meet two primary goals for interlingua: first, it must be easier to accurately translate from the source natural language into the interlingua than into another natural language; and, second, it must be almost trivially easy (i.e., requiring simple computer programming) to accurately translate from the interlingua into the target language. In other words, mapping between natural languages and the interlingua must be both accurate and made as easy as possible. The interlingua achieves these goals by means of its simple but powerful derivational morphology which makes word design rigorous yet straight-forward, while at the same time greatly reducing the number of basic morphemes (i.e. primitives) required by the language.
Tilya, by Herman Miller
The original motivation for designing Tilya was to provide a system to organize and make sense of the growing vocabularies of languages like Gjarrda and Tirehlat. Eventually, the Tilya dictionary will become a template for the lexicons of future Azirian languages, to avoid the common pitfall of relexifying English. Although the idea of making Tilya a logical language was partly inspired by the Lojban project, Tilya has different goals.
Yet Another Logical Language (Yall), by David Madore
Classical Yiklamu, by Mark Line
Yiklamu's purpose is to enable interested users to explore the possibilities of highly disambiguated verbal communication. The unusual degree of disambiguation provided by the language derives from its lexicon, which was created by associating stem forms to the over 90,000 thesaurus entries of Wordnet. The morphosyntax prescribed for the language is minimal, and is intended to evolve with use -- hence the term Classical Yiklamu to refer to the current stage in its development.
Ygyde, by Andrew Nowicki
Ygyde is a compound language, which means that its vocabulary is made of compound words. Examples of the Ygyde compound words:
aniga (corrupt) = a (adjective) + ni (secret) + ga (money)
ofyby (bread) = o (noun) + fy (foam) + by (food)
igugo (to vaporize) = i (verb) + gu (liquid) + go (gas).
Ygyde is a superb international auxiliary language because it is easy to pronounce (no consonant clusters), easy to understand (two consecutive vowels = the end of one word and the beginning of the next word), and very easy to learn (the meaning of compound words is defined by the root words). Ygyde links:Ygyde basics,English-Ygyde Dictionary,Ygyde grammar
Conlang Directories:
Other links:
< Minyeva Index << www.alkaline.org
copyright 2004 by Garrett Jones