Loglan: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:41, 7 September 2002

Revision as of 09:55, 7 September 2002

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For example, you can literally say that john, a person, is a short word. Or one can directly and precisely say any of the 22 different meanings of the English phrase "a pretty little girls school." This feature is so pronounced that people fluent in Loglan say impossible things as a sort of joke- a type of humour simply not supported by the linguistic machinery of other languages.

The oddest, most difficult thing for a speaker of an Indo-european language like English is that Loglan has no nouns or verbs, objects, direct objects, indirect objects or, possessive forms or tenses. There are only predicates, with places to place variables: e.g. botso: X buys Y from P for price Q. There are prefixes to reorder predicates, for example, price would be botso with a little word to make price the first variable. With different reordierings, one speaks of buyer, bought-thing, or seller. Tenses for time, ___location, actor, type of action, etc. are provided by "little words" which are optional. Predicates compound, so a predicate can fit in the variable of another predicate. Every language feature has standard, regular forms for acting in compounds. For example, time-travel tenses are possible trvially in Loglan (I did X from time Y to P in time Q.) using compounding forms normally used for ___location tenses.

After long use, the world has a sort of timeless, objectless, actorless flavor. Time words and ___location words fall away except when needed to make a point, usually with emotional emphasis. It is rather easy to avoid blame for responsibilities in loglan. Scheduling is ambiguous, you see, because the tenses are optional.

The language is designed so that the patterns of phonemes always parse into words. Thus, one cannot mumble Loglan, because even when run together, the langyage is still parsable.

The language is designed so that the patterns of phonemes always parse into words. Thus, one cannot mumble Loglan, because even when run together, the langyagelanguage is still parsable.

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