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LOGLAN 1: A LOGICAL LANGUAGE
Revised Fourth Edition
by
James Cooke Brown
THE LOGLAN INSTITUTE, INC.
c/o Jennifer Brown
1701 N.E. 75 St.
Gainesville, FL 32641
HTML Edition
prepared by
James Jennings
1999
PDF Edition
compiled by
Cecil T. Sims

2008

Downloading the PDF Edition of this book, and making one paper copy of it for your personal
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medium shall be used for any commercial purpose whatever without the express written
permission of the copyright owner, The Loglan Institute, Inc.
As of this writing, the 1989 Fourth Edition is still in print for those who prefer a bound book.
Copyright Page From the 4th Paper Edition
To the memory of
BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
1897-1941
Copyright © 1966, 1969, 1975, 1989
by The Loglan Institute, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The word 'Loglan'® is a registered trademark of The Loglan Institute, Inc., and may not be used
on packaging or descriptions of products offered for sale unless a license for such use has been
granted the vendor by The Loglan Institute. Such licenses will not normally be denied vendors
who agree to use authentic Loglan in their products.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, James Cooke, 1921-
Loglan 1: A logical language
Fourth edition.

Bibliography: p.
1. Loglan (Artificial language) I. Loglan Institute. II Title.
PM8590.B7 1989 499'.99 89-7968
ISBN 1-877665-00-Z

Printed in the U.S.A.
BookCrafters - Fredericksburg
Virginia
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
This edition is double the size of the Third Edition and reflects the re-engineering of Loglan that
took place between 1975 and 1989, a research program participated in by the hundreds of active
loglanists who assembled around the language after the 1975 publications. Part of the increase in
size of this new edition is due to the fact that it has some 60 pages of word-lists, while the Third
Edition had but a single glossary of 16 pages. The reason for the inclusion of these new and
bulkier word-lists is that this edition, unlike its predecessor, must stand alone. The 1975 edition
was accompanied by the then-freshly revised Second Edition of our dictionaries, Loglan 4 & 5,
also published in 1975. But in the last half dozen years the Loglan word-makers have been very
active. Since 1975 the lexicon of Loglan has more than doubled in size. In particular, it has
grown from around 4,000 terms then to more than 9,000 terms, and at present rates of growth
there could well be 12,000 terms in our dictionary files by the time the Third Edition of our
dictionary is ready to be printed. While all these new lexical materials are safely stored on The
Institute's computers, where they may be--and often are--augmented, The Institute does not yet
have the editorial staff to build a bilingual dictionary which is three or even two times the size of
our present one. Dictionary-work is by far the most labor-intensive, and therefore the most
costly, work we do. lt is hoped that with the publication of this Fourth Edition we will grow
sufficiently both in numbers and in revenues in the next few years to make the expansion and
publication of a new bilingual dictionary of 10,000 or 15,000 Loglan terms the next large project
of The Loglan Institute.
In the meantime, Loglan 1 must, as I say, stand alone. It must not only serve the user as a
resource book on the grammar, morphology, and usages of the new language, but also as a tool
with which to update and freely add to the old dictionary. By including complete lists of
primitives and affixes in this volume, I have tried to make it possible for the buyer of this book
who also owns a copy of the 1975 dictionary to update the latter on demand. For example,
suppose such a user were to look up the 1975 word for 'understand'. He or she would find the so-
called "complex" word sadja with sanpa djano ("sign-know") listed as its "deriving metaphor".
The user could safely assume that the metaphor was still valid. So using Appendix B of this
volume, the user would find that saa- and -dja were among the new affixes of sanpa and djano,
and they could then be confidently combined to produce the new Loglan word for 'understand',
namely saadid (pronounced "sah-AHD-ja"). Moreover, by following the rules given in this
book, all users will arrive at this result.
The language has grown in all its other departments as well. Usages in particular have
multiplied. Loglan morphology, too, is now better understood; and so its exposition has grown.
Above all, Loglan grammar is now a much more flexible Instrument than it was in 1975 as well
as a completely conflict-free one; so there are now many more ways of using it. As a
consequence of these additions to the language, nearly all the chapters of the Third Edition have
had to be considerably expanded. The only exceptions are the Foreword, which though
supplemented with a new historical addendum has been otherwise left intact, and Chapter 7,
which is entirely new. In the latter I discuss for the first time publically a detailed program for
testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with Loglan. This project may still be some years away. But
it may well be time for the present generation of loglanists to prepare themselves for their crucial
roles in it.
J.C.B
Gainesville
April, 1989
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
This work is a revision and abridgement of the Second Edition published on microfilm in 1969
(University Microfilms Catalogue No. S-398, Ann Arbor, Michigan). Virtually no grammatical
changes have taken place in the language since that date but a system of "implicit quantification"
has been introduced with the object of making certain logically complex expressions speakable,
and these have occasioned certain minor changes in the usage-patterns of the language. The new
usages will be found in Section 3.16 in Chapter 3 (4.16 in the earlier edition), Sections 4.21 and
4.24 (formerly 5.21 and 5.24), Sections 5.9, 5.11, 5.16-18 and 5.22 (6.9, 6.11, 6.16-18 and 6.21),
and Section 5.21 is new. As the preparation of this edition was undertaken after the 1972-74
revision of the dictionary had been completed, Chapter 6 on Words and Growth has been almost
entirely rewritten to accommodate the new lexical materials; in particular, Sections 6.2-4 are
new. Chapter 7 of the Second Edition on Uses and Prospects has been eliminated in this edition
both for reasons of space and because some of those prospects have been realized. For example,
it is now clear that Loglan is a speakable language. It is therefore reasonable to hope that the
publication of this Third Edition together with a newly augmented edition of the dictionary
(Loglan 4 & 5) will make possible the experimental work for which the language was originally
designed. Those wishing to participate in this work may communicate with the Institute through
either of the addresses given on the title page.
J. C. B.
Ibiza
April, 1975
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Substantial portions of this work have been published in a First Edition issued by the Loglan
Institute in 1966. The present work is a revision and augmentation of that earlier one. In
particular, the Foreword, Chapters 1 and 2, and Sections 4.7, 5.12, 5.23-24, 6.18 and the Notes
are new; Chapter 3 has been omitted; and Sections 5.10, 5.18, 5.21-22 (5.17, 5.20- 21 in the
earlier edition), 6.8, 6.16-17, 6.19 and 6.21 (6.18 and 6.20) have been substantially revised.
Except for the systematic distinction now drawn between the "afterthought" and "forethought"
modes of connection, the structure of the language is essentially unchanged.
J. C. B.
Gainesville
March, 1969
PREFACE TO THE FIRST (PREPRINT)
EDITION
This edition of some several hundred copies is meant to be distributed to several kinds of
readers: (1) those who have corresponded with me about Loglan over the years since the
publication of the Scientific American article in 1960; (2) those among the readers of several
journals who have responded with interest to a recent announcement of the project; and (3) a
handful of scholars whom vie have expressly invited to examine one feature or another of Loglan
in advance of publication. Our motives in preparing such a prepublication edition are threefold:
First, Loglan purports to be a logical language. We should like to give logicians an opportunity
to inform us where, and in what respects, Loglan as it stands is not. Then, in consequence of the
revision that will be enabled by their criticism, the published version of the language will have a
better chance of fulfilling this broad claim.
Second, this book in particular purports to be a popular introduction to Loglan, meant to engage
a substantial proportion of its readers in such further study as may lead, in some of them at least,
to active mastery of the language. Languages, however, are more than commonly complex
affairs. One does not succeed in writing simply about a complex thing solely by deciding to do
so. Again, I should like to be told where I have failed.
Third, interest in Loglan among academics--once very lively--has all but died. Six years of
silence after the publication of a set of prolegomena does not fit the temper of the times. I frankly
hope in this semi-private publication to stir that interest up again. For without academic support
the publication of the other Loglan manuscripts--and there are several--is likely to be delayed for
some time.
Over the years since the publication of those prolegomena several thousand pages of manuscript
have been prepared. There are two dictionaries (English-Loglan and Loglan-English, the first
with 12,000, the second with 3000 entries); there is a programmed textbook equivalent to about a
semester of college work; and there is a major portion of a technical treatise on the linguistical
aspects of the subject in addition to the computer programs and working papers not primarily
meant for publication. To a serious student of the language none of these books will be worth
much without the others.
Moreover all of them have waited for a suitable introduction, which it has been my purpose in
the present volume to provide.
Of all the academic interests that bear on Loglan it is the linguistic interest that is least well-
served by the present book. Linguistical matters--being in the main descriptions of the
unconscious features of the language act--are far more difficult to deal with popularly than
logical ones. Everyone knows at least a little about how he thinks; hardly anyone knows anything
about how he talks. Because this book will, in published form, be addressed primarily to the
general reader, I have therefore sidestepped linguistic issues wherever I could, planning to treat
the most important of them in appendices in subsequent editions of the work. 1 This has meant
ignoring the concerns of the linguist almost entirely in this book, especially as in this preprint
edition it is virtually stripped of appendices. But the linguist will take some comfort I hope in
knowing that another volume in this series is addressed exclusively to him.2
In short, there are two kinds of questions one can ask about Loglan. The first is, Is it a language?
The second is, Is it a logical language? This book deals only with the second question; for it
takes an affirmative answer to the first for granted. Yet the first contains the germ of a very
interesting scientific question: Can a language of any kind be built? I hope this brief foreword
will apprise the scientific reader that I am not unalert to the importance of this question. But it
turns out that one cannot describe a language attractively to its eventual speakers by dwelling on
the question of whether they exist.
J. C. B.
Paris
March, 1966
1 The appendices growing out of my correspondence over the First Edition became a second
book, Loglan 2: Methods of Conststuction originally published on microfilm (Brown (1969a) but
later published serially in the first and second volumes of The Loglanist, 1976-78.
2 Loglan 2, but now not quite "exclusively", as aspects of Loglan of interest to computer
scientists are also discussed in this book.
PRONUNCIATION GUIDES
Vowels Consonants
1. as in E. 'father' (Anglo- b as in 'boy' [b]
[ah]
German dialects)
c as 'sh' in 'shy' [sh]
a
2. as S. 'casa', F. 'la', and E.
[aa] d as in 'dog' [d]
'palm'
f as in 'fog' [f]
1. before vowels, 'eigh' as in
[eigh]
'eight' g as in 'get' [g]
e
[e] or h as in 'hut' [h]
2. elsewhere, as in 'met'
[eh]
as 's' in 'measure' 'z' in 'azure',
j [zh]
1. before vowels, 'y' as in 'yet' [y] and 'J' in F. 'Jean'
i
2. elsewhere, as 'ee' in 'feet' [ee] k as in 'kin' [k]
1. before /r/ or /i/, 'aw' as in 1. as in 'let' [l]
[aw] l
'law'
o 2. as in 'bottle' when vocalic [ll]
2. elsewhere, as in 'note' [oh]
1. as in 'met' [m]
m
1. before vowels, 'w' as in 'wee' [w]
2. as in 'rhythm' when vocalic [mm]
u
2. elsewhere, as 'oo' in 'boot' [oo]
1. before /k/ or /g/, as 'ng' in
[ng]
as 'u' in F. 'plus' and as 'ü' in G. 'sing'
w [eu]
'Mühle' n
2. elsewhere as in 'net' [n]
y as 'u' in 'up' and 'a' in 'about' [uh]
3. as 'en' in 'listen' when vocalic [nn]
p as in 'pet' [p]
Diphthongs
q as 'th' in 'thin' [th]
1. as in 'rat' [r]
ai as 'igh' in 'sigh' [igh]
r
2. as 'er' in 'father' when vocalic [rr]
as 'ow' in 'cow' and 'ough' [ow] or
ao
in 'bough' [ough] [s] or
s as in 'sat'
[ss]
[ay] or
ei as 'ay' in 'day'
[eight-ee] t as in 'tin' [t]
oi as 'oy' in 'boy' [oy] v as in 'vet' [v]
x as 'ch' in G. 'Bach' [kh]

z as in 'zinc' [z]
FOREWORD
At the beginning of Christmas Holidays, 1955, I sat down before a bright fire to commence what
I hoped would be a short paper on the possibility of testing the social psychological implications
of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I meant to proceed by showing that the construction of a tiny
model language, with a grammar borrowed from the rules of modern logic, taught to subjects of
different nationalities in a laboratory setting under conditions of control, would permit a decisive
test. I have been writing appendices for that paper ever since. I believed, once or twice, that I had
glimpsed the end of it; but I cannot yet be certain.
This book is one of those appendices. It is a first installment on what I think I have seen in the
intriguing prospect which has opened up for me by working with the Whorf hypothesis. It is also
an effort to put the structural matter of a not-so-tiny--and still incomplete--artificial language into
the hands of those who will, if it really is a language, find that out for me by speaking it.
The book is also faintly impolite. If it were polite, it would have to bow itself out of existence.
For its humblest thesis is a challenge to the scientific authority of those who believe that human
languages cannot be constructed. But I tender this challenge with the expectation of the
imminent arrival of a strong ally. In science, at least, the final judgement of what is and what is
not impossible belongs to Nature not to man.
The book is also impolite in what I hope will be found a more agreeable sense in that it makes
free use for experimental purposes of results which were in the first place purely formal. I allude,
of course, to the use I have made of the formal inventions of logicians, not all of whom will
appreciate the lowly forms I have bent them toward in the interests of speakability. Still, I take it
to be one of the prices of publication that one occasionally finds one's work borrowed for
unexpected applications. I hope Loglan will not be found so counterindicated by the logical
fraternity that they will make no similar trespass on my own.
Among the scholars whose work I have freely borrowed, and on whose insights nearly all that is
good in Loglan probably depends, I must mention my indebtedness to the late Hans
Reichenbach. His analysis of token-reflexive words in particular, and of conversational forms in
general, has become part of the structure of Loglan. I must acknowledge also my profound debt
to Rudolf Carnap, on whom I, like everyone, depend for his conceptions of object language and
metalanguage, and for his formulation of the concept of the semantical field. Besides, it was
Carnap's view of the possibility of logical languages in the first place which almost certainly
shaped my own. From the pragmatist tradition in philosophy I have derived the chief grounding
of my theory of Loglan semantics, especially from the early, seminal work of Charles Morris on
the general theory of signs. In particular, I feel that my view of predication and designation, as
complementary halves of the language act, is as implicit in his work as it is certainly central to
mine.
Finally, among philosophers and logicians I must mention Willard van Ormand Quine. Quine's
work, more than any other, presented both confirmation and challenge to me. The publication of
Word and Object in 1960 was an epochal event in the development of Loglan. Page after page
seemed to have been designed to provoke, counsel and console anyone who would build a
logical language which was at the same time to be ontologically sound. Most of his insights,
happily, were confirmatory; others were easily incorporated into what had been the structure of
Loglan. A few remained linguistically indigestible, but these evoked, by opposition, some of the
more novel ontological features of the language. Let me mention only one: my treatment of
indirect discourse as the designation of an event abstraction. This insight, if it is one, was forced
on me by my inability to render speakable the more intricate ontological solution of Quine.
Among the older generation of linguists I owe a very special debt to the late Otto Jespersen. It
was his Analytic Syntax which provided the first testing ground of my thesis that a human
grammar could be written in the predicate calculus. In a similar way the work of Zellig Harris
provided me, as everyone, with the descriptive machinery which was to serve as a test of the
structural completeness of the language. Finally, the design of Loglan phonology owes much to
the distinctive features analysis of Roman Jakobson.
Among [later] linguists I owe a quite particular debt to Victor Yngve, whose formulation of the
depth hypothesis, and whose consequent view of the constraints placed on grammar by the
speech generating process, have informed nearly all my own efforts to make Loglan speakable. I
owe a similar debt to Noam Chomsky, whose views of the relationship between rules of
grammar and the grammatical domain provided the theoretical focus of my work on ambiguity.
Finally, I should mention the practical relevance to Loglan of the work of Anthony G. Oettinger
and Susumu Kuno on the machine analysis of ambiguity. Unfortunately, the publication of their
work in 1963 was just too late for Loglan. In September of that year I had completed my own
search for ambiguity in the language by cruder means and was turning to other things. To have
done it over again by their more powerful methods would have delayed the publication of the
language by at least two more years. I decided not to do it. At the time it was my hope that an
ambiguity analysis of Loglan by their methods would one day be performed. [Loglan grammar
was in fact finally disambiguated in 1982 by the even more powerful methods of Aho, Johnson
and Ullman (1975).]
Everyone who writes on matters semantical in English is beholden to the early work of C. K.
Ogden and I. A. Richards. Moreover, in the patient inquiries of Ogden and his colleagues into the
idiom structure of English, I found one of the cornerstones on which to rest the structure of
primitives in Loglan. In a similar way, Helen Eaton's 1940 list of the most frequently used
concepts In the four major European languages (excluding Russian) was of inestimable value in
testing the adequacy of the Loglan list of primitives for the semantics of those languages.
No one who works with elements as varied, or lists as long, as those that make up a language can
afford to work alone. The assistance I required in the first five years of my work with Loglan
was paid for by my paternal connection with a certain board game called Careers; and to my
publishers, Parkers Brothers of Salem, Mass., and the youngsters who played that game during
this, and a later, period I and Loglan owe a not inconsiderable debt. But by 1960 not even
Careers could support our increasingly Augean labors; and I turned to more usual sources of
academic finance. Much in this connection is owed to the then-editors of the Scientific American.
Their willingness to publish the prolegomena of Loglan in that year secured that critical degree
of publicity without which nothing fiscal is possible in our civilization, and with which, perhaps,
very nearly anything is.
But it is to the then-reigning board of social science advisers to the U.S. Department of Health,
Education and Welfare that Loglan owes its most direct financial debt. Without the generous
assistance provided by the Department through its Institutes of Health (specifically, Mental;
Grant Number M-4980) neither the dictionary-building nor the computer studies of Loglan could
have been contemplated. Even after the expiration of that early grant, however, computing time
was generously made available to me by the computing centers at both the University of Florida
at Gainesville and Florida State University at Tallahassee through their on-going support by the
National Science Foundation. To the lenient wisdom of these two national organizations, and to
the directors and steering committees of these two regional centers, I would like to express my
sincere appreciation for the opportunity they gave me for dialogue with the machine. For many
years it was my only informant on matters loglandic, and it is the most articulate speaker of the
language yet.
Many human individuals have also worked for and with me on Loglan. The list of those who
have worked in either formal or informal capacities on the project includes Monte R. Blair, Mrs.
Patricia Carmony, Mrs. Jean Chalmers, P. H. Coates, Peter Drummond, H. Greisdorf, Ted R.
Keiser, Mrs. Mary E. Kimmel, Ida Larsen, Catherine A. Loveland, Morgan MacLachlan, P. H.
Monet, Mrs. Carol S. Morrison, Harrison Murphy, Ardesh Narain, Arthur E. Nudleman, P.
Sanchez, Mrs. Caroline Smith, Mrs. Margaret Sung, J. Stefnastoti, Mrs. Wilda Szeremi, Mrs.
Christine S. Tennant, Robert L. Tennant and John W. Warne. I wish also to thank the handful of
scholars who have read this or earlier drafts of the MS, or who have in other ways lent me their
professional criticism and advice. Among them are Mr. Julian Granberry, Prof. Thomas A. E.
Hart, Prof. Charles Morris, Dr. F. Rand Morton, Dr. James Oliver, Mr. Mortimer Shagrin and Dr.
Benjamin Wyckoff.
Among those who read the preprint edition of this book were many who found the time to help
me locate its errors or realize its many opportunities for improvement. I feel especially indebted
to H. D. Baecker, T. M. Bloomfield, G. Peter Esainko, Eric Martz, Howard Reep, Perry Smith,
W. A. Verloren van Themaat, Viryl V. Vary, and James F. Wirth for their very extensive
comment; the book is a good deal better than it would have been without their comments.
I also wish to take this opportunity to thank the many students who have helped me to
understand the language by attempting to learn it at various stages of its development,
particularly as this often involved the peculiar pain of submitting to imperfect teaching programs.
It is from these cheerful subjects that we have gathered whatever we now know of the phonology
of the language, as well as whatever insights we now have into how to teach it.
Finally, I wish above all to acknowledge the ten years' collaboration of my [then] wife, Lujoye
Fuller Brown, often amounting to coauthorship, and the unstinting labors of Mr. and Mrs. Ted
Keiser, our colleagues in the Institute, who among many other services to Loglan shouldered in
our absence the job of publishing and distributing the 1966 edition of this book.