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

What is Loglan? A short description of Loglan and its origins. This is the flyer that The Loglan Institute mails to people who inquire. Vizka La Spat A short bit of text with a detailed explaination for those who have never seen Loglan before. 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.) 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.

Regular Columns from Lognet

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.)

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. For Programmers: The Loglan Institute is making the source code for its various software products available for download. 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. 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. "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. Rex May's cartoons which appeared in the pages of Lognet have been collected here. 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. Information on Other Constructed Languages Our CEO, Randall Holmes, has a personal Loglan page.

Loglan is mentioned briefly in the novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein

A character in the web comic "Spare Parts" is majoring in artificial languages.

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:

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.