thank you to prepdenile, warpedwiselegoman, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at Lojban but worse, Loglan. I guess
we’ve really come full circle now, huh? when I started this show, it was because I
specifically wanted to talk about how I really don’t like Lojban. of course, since then,
I’ve learned about a whole lot of languages that are considerably worse, so now Lojban
doesn’t look so bad.
Loglan is an engineered language that was created in 1955 by the late Dr. James Cooke
Brown. like the other logical languages that came after it, Loglan was designed to be completely
structurally unambiguous, and was based on the concept of predicate logic, which is a
way of analyzing language that’s fundamentally different from how people naturally process
language. the idea is that if you learned to speak such a language, you’d also start
to think differently. the tricky thing is getting people to learn it in the first place.
Loglan’s consonants are:
okay so this is p similar to Lojban’s inventory, with only a couple differences. wait, first,
I never actually made a chart for Lojban so I’ll just make one now.
so as you can see, Lojban removed the dental fricative (which makes sense because it’s
only in like a twenty fifth of all languages) and added the glottal stop. (which doesn’t
make sense because it’s in less than like nine twentieths of all languages) anyway,
back to Loglan. excluding the rhotic, seven of these consonants are absent from most languages,
which are, in decreasing order of commonality, /f/, /ʃ/, /z/, /v/, /ʒ/, /x/, and /θ/.
now, the reason I excluded the rhotic from that list is because this is another example
of the “whatever rhotic” in use. you just pronounce however you pronounce it in
your native language! what do you mean you can’t distinguish between and , doesn’t
every language do that? what are you even talking about not being able to hear the difference
between the rhotic sound and the voiced palatoalveolar fricative, those are completely different sounds!
to be fair, the two least common consonants here, /x/ and /θ/, are both referred to as
“irregular consonants”, and they weren’t included in the original version of Loglan,
so they don’t appear in the core vocabulary.
while we’re at it, I’d like to point out that Dr. Jim Brown wasn’t very good at IPA.
the chart you’re looking at now has the actual IPA representations of Loglan’s consonants,
and this chart has them written the way Dr. Jim apparently thought the IPA wrote them.
yes Jim, palatoalveolar consonants are written with heckin tone diacritics over alveolar
consonants. good job. also, this is a bit of a tangent, but the way the sound /x/ is
described implies that he didn’t actually know what sound it was. /x/ is called, quote,
“...the voiced version of h; it is the “rough breath” of Greek and Russian, and the sound
spelled with the letter chi (‘χ’) in Greek. In fact our European letter ‘X’
is derived from ‘χ’. X [kh] is also the sound represented by ‘ch’ in both German
and Scottish. Thus Xai-kre is pronounced [KHIGH-uh-kreh], in which the [KH] is a very distinct but dry
sort of gargle which will sound very Russian to you when you get it right.”
from that quote alone, you could infer that represents the voiced glottal fricative,
the voiced palatal fricative, the voiceless uvular fricative, or even the uvular trill.
oh, and if you wanna get technical, Loglan also has a few affricates that are analyzed
as clusters: /ts/, /dz/, /tʃ/, and /dʒ/.
anyways, Loglan’s vowels are:
seven vowels! there’s seven of them. not the most I’ve seen in an international language,
but it sure is a lot! Loglan’s diphthongs are:
those transcriptions might not be accurate. again, Dr. Jim Brown wasn’t very good at
IPA, and none of these diphthongs actually had their IPA pronunciations listed. instead,
he used examples of words in English that have them, which would mean that they’re
actually pronounced like this.
I’m just gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that those are just approximations
of how they’re pronounced for the benefit of English speakers, and not actually their
canonical forms. on top of these vowels, there’s also four consonants with syllabic pronunciations,
/m/, /n/, /l/, and /r/. if you count those, Loglan has fifteen vowels total.
with the phonology taken as a whole, we’ve got another Esperanto type situation here
where Loglan’s phonology isn’t fully compatible with any major language. I guess if you count
sounds that only appear in loanwords then it’s compatible with German, but if you
don’t, there’s no major language whose speakers will be able to speak Loglan without
needing to learn new sounds.
but, hold on a second, does that even matter? even if you assume that pronounceability is
important for internationality, Loglan isn’t really trying super hard to be international.
shouldn’t it count as an artlang, and therefore be immune to this sort of phonological criticism?
well, this is something that I haven’t done a great job explaining, but my classification
of conlangs into interlangs and artlangs is almost completely arbitrary. internationality
doesn’t need to be the primary goal of a conlang for me to count it as an interlang.
Loglan claims that its logical nature, quote, “...would not unsuit it to be an international
auxiliary tongue for everyman.” that means that internationality was at least somewhat
taken into account when Loglan was designed, and therefore means that I’ll be calling it an interlang.
whew. let’s talk about the orthography.
Loglan’s orthography is logical, but ugly. I had the same problem with Lojban. sure like,
it makes logical sense to write /ʃ/ with , and then it makes sense to write /tʃ/
with the letter for /t/ and the letter for /ʃ/. every step of the process that leads
to /tʃ/ being written with makes sense, but it just looks so ugly is the thing.
it’s even worse with the sounds that were added late in Loglan’s development. by the
time /y/, /ə/, /θ/, and /x/ were added, there weren’t any “good letters” left,
so they had to be written with the leftovers. the reason these were added was so that scientific
classifications of species could be loaned more precisely, which, fun fact, aren’t
even written phonetically! they’re written with a completely separate orthography that’s
real life actually only used for scientific classifications of species!! so like, what’s
even the point??
there’s also this weird thing with how consecutive vowels work. like, every combination of ,
, , , and is allowed in Loglan, but it’s inconsistent what it’ll actually mean.
four of them are pronounced as diphthongs, one of which isn’t even pronounced the way
it’s written, ten of them can be pronounced either as two separate vowels or as rising
diphthongs, and the rest can only be pronounced as two separate vowels. but why? if you’re
going to have some pairs of vowels that can be either diphthongs or actual consecutive
vowels, why even make the distinction? why not just allow every pair of vowels to be
pronounced both ways?
oh also this is a phonology thing not an orthography thing but hey why does Loglan allow you to
have the same vowel twice in a row? it’s not phonemic vowel length because the reference
grammar is very clear that it’s pronounced as two syllables in those cases, and at some
points specifically says that you can and should pronounce single vowels long, so what the heck?
the Loglan word for forty two is “foto”. that’s not really relevant to the review
in any way, but I felt like it had to be said somewhere. you know what else needs to be
said? “eight most”. that’s just two random words! don’t know why I said them.
anyway, Loglan’s vocabulary was derived with similar, but not identical, methods as
Lojban’s. words are based on English, Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, French, Japanese,
and German, which, at the time Loglan was made, were the eight most commonly spoken
languages. every basic word is meant to sound at least somewhat like its equivalent in most
of the source languages. for example, the Loglan word for mother is “mamta”, which
does in fact sound pretty much exactly like Lojban word for mother which I used to demonstrate
this concept in the Lojban episode! hold on, I gotta find a different example word.
okay, the word for father is “farfu”, which does in fact sound a lot like father,
父亲, and Vater, and I guess the r makes it kinda similar to padre and père,
but it doesn’t sound much at all like पिता, отец, or お父さん.
now, if we look at the Lojban version of this same word, which was derived somewhat more
mathematically and therefore should more closely resemble its source languages, we’ll see
that oh wow the Lojban word for father is also farfu. come on, there’s gotta be something
that’s different! okay, one of the things I didn’t like about Lojban’s vocabulary
was that some of its words for places aren’t derived from endonyms. like, the word for
“Japanese” is “ponjo”, which sounds very little like 日本. so in Loglan,
which prioritizes endonyms, the word for Japanese is are you kidding me it’s also “ponjo”?
ugh, okay. I just gotta find something that’s different. this shouldn’t be this hard.
Lojban is literally just Loglan with different vocabulary so this should be the easiest part to do.
um, here, I think I found one? the Loglan word for logic is “lodji”, and the Lojban
word for logic is uh, “logji” which is basically the same thing but harder to pronounce?
I guess what I’m saying is that the difference between Lojban and Loglan’s core vocabularies
isn’t very significant? like, they have roughly the same phonotactics except Lojban
allows more stuff, and, more importantly, their words are about equally likely to be
familiar to speakers. dzoru and kalma, which both mean walk, are equally unfamiliar to my ear.
the grammar of Loglan is more or less the same as Lojban. if there’s any significant
differences, I didn’t notice them. reading about Loglan grammar felt like reading about
Lojban grammar except things were referred to with slightly more sensible names. as you
might know, the types of words in Lojban are called things like “fu’ivla”, “tanru”,
“cmavo”, and “gismu”. normal linguists would call these “loanwords”, “compounds”,
“particles”, and “verbs”. Loglan calls them “borrowings”, “metaphors”, “little words", and "primitives".
I don’t know why these logical languages are so determined to trick people into thinking
that they don’t have verbs. verbs are like the basis of the entire vocabulary! it’s
okay, you can embrace it!
all in all, I’d say that Loglan is to Lojban as Esperanto is to Ido. I know that that comparison
might sound super obvious, but it’s true. Lojban is an improvement over Loglan, but
it’s also significantly worse than Loglan in enough ways that it’s roughly the same
quality overall. that in mind, I’d say that I like Loglan more than I like Ygyde, but
not as I like Lojban, making it the fifth best interlang reviewed so far. thanks for
watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing, you know what? Zese.
dang I hope you liked that pun because I’m gonna make it so many times in the next episode,
you have no idea. you know what zey say!