Freudenthal's critique of Loglan

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JAMES COOKE BROWN,  Loglan, a logical language.  The

Loglan Institute,  Gainesvili~., Florida,  1966, Mimeo-

graphed, vii, 222 pp.

Inventing a language is a tedious business. What the author

experienced as flashes of thought, will not be recognized by the

reader as such. Of course the author always believes that his system

works because as soon as it does not, he is ready to revise it. With

the same right the reader, less committed, is allowed to be more

pessimistic. The referee is left with the hardest task. It would be a

silly enterprise to quote out of the inexhaustible amount of details,

but it would not be easy to find enough major points frcm which

something like a total view should be possible. The only attitude I

can imagine is criticism, not to belittle the effort but to show that

it is taken seriously. In fact a review on a language invention which

is not utterly critical, must: be either superficial or non-serious.

Loglan should be a logical language according to the author.

Cleariv he does not mean the word 'logical' in a technical sense, but

rather in the vague and illogical sense it has in ordinary speech. To a

quit,~ modest degree the author has been influenced by logistics;

no-there this influence has been profound, This, probably, is the

mo_,s~ severe criticism against his design.

Without doubt the author borrowed from logistics the idea to

deal with all content words (that is all except structure words) as

pre0icMes, and to ~,tate clearly how many free places a particular

predicat~ contains and in which order they are arranged. Also from

logL, Aic.~ he took the requirement that all subjects be free or bound

variables.

There are a few reasons why he did not succeed in realizing this

program. First, he did not clarify the logical status of the so-called

modifiers (adjectives added to a noun, adverbs added to an adjective

or an adverb, and so on). Do they mean that a predicate has hidden

free places which are not accounted for in the official number ? Are

modifiers to be considered as predicates or as variables or, perhaps,

as structure words ?

Secondly, though naming variables is regulated by more effective

rules than in natural languages, it still suffers from the usual this-

that-rule - 'this' referring to the last mentioned subject and 'that'

to the one but last.

Thirdly, in dealing with variables, there is no indication that the

author has understood the basic character of binding procedures,

whether these are bindings by quantifier, article binding, inter-

rogative binding or demonstrative binding (compare the reviewer's

Lincos). Notwithstanding many improvements in details, the

binding techniques are as implicit, as weak and as :'logical as in

natural languages.

The problem of modifiers, mentioned as point one, can only be

.~olved in the frame of a satisfactory binding technique. In many

other cases the lack of insight into binding techniques has led to

absurd ,t~luti,;ns. According to the author a predicate A always

.means 'capable of being A', unless it is modified by a tense word

(~ueh as 'now' ior the present tense), which is not counted as a free

place of A. %, ,3urns' means 'flammable', and to express 'is burning'

one has to say 'now burns'. (It is not clear how 'was flammable' and

'will be flammable' has to be translated.) A correct solution would be

to recognize a time variable in every realistic predicate and to

create good techniques for different kinds of binding. Obviously the

author's solution is greatly influenced by English idiom - often the

present tense, if confronted with the gerund construction, means a

capability instead of an actual event.

The presentation of Loglm, suffers from dogmatism. It is evident

that at every step the language builder has had to choose between

two or more possibilities. In important cases one would like to know

why the author chose one rather than another, but such motives

are never explained. For instance, why are all adjectivic predicates

assumed to mean comparatives ? I cannot imagine any reasonable

answcr. Why do modifiers precede the modified word ? Because tape

worm English (pretty small girls school) suggests this quite illogical

construction? Of course such a rule cannot be maintained to the

bitter end. So the author has to introduce structure words which

allow the modifier to be placed after the modified word

Such 'conversion' connectives which indicate the permutation of

free places, are, in general, a healthy idea. So are the spoken

punctuations (e.g. in 'pretty small girls school') though even in

punctuation the author could have learned more from logistics.

Much care is bestowed on a phonetic system which clearly indicates

the separation of clauses into words and the belonging of a word to a

word class (structure words, content words, proper nouns and so

on).

The presentation suffers not only from a lack of reasoning, but

still more from the total absence of connected texts. I would have

liked to understand the author's technique of building abstractions

which is exposed twice (p. 38 and p. 71). Abstraction is a complex

problem which cannot completely be solved by the formal means of

logistics though some knowledge of logistics can be quite a help. On

the other hand understanding the less formal part of abstraction

presupposes long illustrative texts, which simply are absent.

There is no glossary of structure words. The glossary c f the

1000 odd content words may be a source of many questio~as, in

particular the question how these notions have been chosen. One is

struck by a lot of rare and involved notions whereas the most

fundamental and most primitive ones are lacking.

The present pamphlet is called a preprint edition. It is to be hoped

thst obviously wrong decisions will be revised in the definitive

print.

U,~iversity o/Utrecht  H. FREUDENTHAL