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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.
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.
A word about footnotes. I have banished most technical discussion and all polemics to the notes and have collected these at the end of each chapter. My purpose is to permit the non-technical reader an untrammeled swing through the book. I trust that the technical reader will not mind piecing out the scientific argument behind the various moves I have made by consulting these notes. He will find that some of them constitute short essays on a moot point. Some moot points, however, require longer essays; and these, while occasionally referred to in this book, have been reserved for the second volume in this series, Loglan 2 .
Except for its bracketed portions, the foregoing essay was written twenty years ago when the Loglan Project was fourteen years old. Now, in 1989, in its thirty-fourth year, Loglan is ready to "go public" again for the third and, I trust, final time.
The first time Loglan left my laboratory was in 1960 with the publication of the Scientific American (SA) article "Loglan" in June of that year. That article, as many older readers will remember, drew an unprecedentedly voluminous response from the international scientific public, and no doubt led to the funding of my early work by The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1961-62. Being funded permitted me to make the first formal studies of Loglan grammar on computers. These were still new to university campuses but marvelously apt for grammatical work. The NIH grant also underwrote the first teaching programs and made possible the extension of the Loglan vocabulary beyond the first few thousand words. Grammatical work was my chief occupation during this period, however, and making the language as accommodating of natural forms as it could be made and remain unambiguous was my chief goal. These studies lasted through 1964. Their completion led to the first book on the language, Loglan: A Logical Language , published in 1966. This book--actually a "preprint edition" through which I sought criticism for my methods--later became Loglan 1 . A few years later the first dictionaries of the language, Loglan 4 and Loglan 5 , were ready for release. These, together with the second edition of Loglan 1 and a book on methods of construction, Loglan 2 , as well as a programmed textbook, Loglan 3 , were all published on microfilm in 1969. This body of early work was intended mainly for the friends of the project that had been made by the SA article in 1960.
Loglan left my workshop for a second time in 1975. Private funding had made possible a further expansion of the dictionaries in 1973-74, and a second edition of Loglan 4 & 5 , together with a third of Loglan 1 , were published In both hardback and paperback editions in December of that year. The response of the scientific and computing communities to the 1975 publications was again very gratifying; the first printing of 3,000 copies of Loglan 1 was soon sold out. We could have sold many more, and would have done so had we known that we were to continue to support ourselves. But The Loglan Institute had just been incorporated as a non-profit research institute so as to permit it to receive public grants; and we decided not to reprint. We expected to be funded; and by 1977 we were learning, through the active use of the language by the new community of loglanists1 which the 1975 books had brought to life, that the language still required some final truing in the engineering laboratory if it were to be as good as it could be as a releaser of Whorfian effects.
Alas, we were not funded. To everyone's surprise the National Science Foundation (NSF) turned down the multidisciplinary research proposal which we submitted to it in 1977, one that proposed that we prepare the language for, and then conduct, an experimental test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis among second-language learners, a plan that had been subscribed to by a group of ten supporting scholars. These had come to us from the full spectrum of related fields: logic, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and computer science; and among them were some of the most respected workers in their fields. Yet NSF declined to support this effort...primarily, we discovered, because Loglan had not pleased the one linguist on its review panel. The other reviewers were delighted with our plans to attempt an experimental test of the Whorf hypothesis and gave our proposal the highest possible marks. But because the Loglan Project was so ineluctably interdisciplinary, a work which crossed the boundaries of many fields, we were obliged to please all its judges; and in this we failed.
Clearly it was back to the test-bench whether funded or not. Once discovered, the structural defects we were finding in the 1975 language, however minor, obviously had to be repaired before I could turn the language over to its ultimate users. So in 1978 The Institute embarked on my several engineering projects anyway, knowing that with only individually donated money and part-time volunteers to help me, the work would proceed at a much slower pace than I had planned. Ten years later I can say with some confidence that we have accomplished everything we set out to do and possibly just a bit more. Loglan is now ready to be used: both experimentally, in a test of the Whorf hypothesis, and as a machine-man interface by the computing world. It may also find its uses as a translation medium for the international dissemination of scientific text; but that may still be some years away.
Old friends of the project will wish to know how the language has changed since 1975. Even more urgently, friends from earlier years will want to know whether Loglan turned out to be speakable or not, that is, whether it is a human language or just another writable code. The answer to the second question is yes. Through an apprenticeship program launched by The Loglan Institute in 1977, in which live-in apprentices learned the language directly from me (and I from them!), I am happy to report that sustained daily Loglan-only conversations lasting three-quarters of an hour or more were achieved with three out of four apprentices within thirty days, usually within twenty. For some years I hadn't known whether the object I had created was a language or not. But in 1977, I learned that it was; it flew.
As for whether and how much the 1975 language has changed, buyers of the 1975 books will be happy to learn that while several peripheral features of Loglan have grown remarkably in the past fourteen years, the core of the language has not changed. Having just revised it, I am happy to report that nearly all the differences between the 3rd and 4th editions of this book have been additive. So nearly everything old readers learned about the 1975 language will still apply. There will, however, be much in the fine grain of the current language that the watchful reader will find interestingly different, and some that is altogether new.
First, many new usages have been invented. By a usage I mean an habitual way of using a language which people employ in recurrent situations. Thus, 'Good morning!' is a usage; so is 'Fire!' In 1975 there were only a few usages, mostly greetings and farewells. The reason was simple. Except for one small group of learner/users--the group that assembled at my Gainesville lake house in 1972 (the first "Loglan Sogrun")--the language had not been socially used. Buyers of the 1975 books, however, began to use the language in a wide variety of exploratory ways including social ones. In 1976 a journal called The Loglanist was established. Here, dozens of new words and usages were proposed by these explorers every year, nearly all of them becoming part of the language. Unfortunately this process dribbled to a near-halt in 1982. This happened primarily because my engineering interventions were temporarily dismantling the language. Still, much had been accomplished. As a consequence of the inventive ferment of 1976-82, the usage patterns of the 1989 language are incomparably richer than those of 1975.
Second, many additional word-forms have been added to Loglan morphology. (The morphology of any language specifies its word-forms and gives the rules by which new words may be added. Chapter 2, Words and Word-Forms, describes the current morphology of Loglan.) The morphology of 1975 Loglan was starkly simple; there were only a few sorts of Loglan words, and adding a new word meant fitting it into a simple, uniform formula. Charming as this simplicity was, however, it had three defects. The first was that the shortest complex words looked like simple words; the 1975 morphology could not distinguish them. The second was that while longer complex words were always recognizable as such, they could not always be deciphered. Finally, the 1975 method of incorporating loan- words was unacceptably Procrustean. Perhaps the reader remembers Procrustes? He was the innkeeper of antiquity whose beds were all of the same size. When a guest came along who was too long to fit a bed, Procrustes chopped him off; when a guest was too short, Procrustes stretched him out. The 1975 borrowing forms were like that. They did semantic violence to the source words. Indeed, they were so Procrustean that a good imitation of a source word was difficult to find.
After several years of studying the "undecipherable affixes" problem, and testing various trial solutions against one another, I settled on a set of regular word-parts (affixes) out of which all complex words could be built. This also solved the "false simples" problem since, when made up of these standard parts, even the shortest complex word could not imitate a simple one. The parts supplied are, of course, routinely decipherable. So loglanists now have a way of introducing new complex words into the language that ensures that they will always be identifiable as such and also be immediately decipherable.
As for making borrowing more flexible, Loglan loan-words are now a residual category: a loan is whatever is not something else. Loans no longer have to fit any particular formula. They may be of any length or shape that does not accidentally imitate some other kind of word, or string of words, that may occur legitimately in the language. For example, protoni cannot be any other kind of word or string of words. Therefore it is a loan-word, and its source is obvious. Neither can iglu nor bakteriorodopsini, and these are also transparent imitations of their sources. Thus Loglan loan-words may now be infinitely varied. So good imitations of the international vocabularies of science and travel are easier to achieve.
Among the minor morphological problems that were also solved was the "packing" problem. Some clusters of 1975 words were so closely packed together into the word-space that under noisy conditions they could easily be mistaken for one another. (Technically speaking, the language was not redundant enough.) "Unpacking" them meant increasing their phonological distance from one another. For example, in the old lexicon, kanti meant 'bill' or 'account' while kante meant the 'number' or 'numerical count' of something; and the two words differed only in their unstressed vowels. To "unpack" them, kante has been remade as konte, and kanti has been retained; but the two concepts now differ in two phonological particulars. They have thus been moved farther apart in the word-space. Only slightly more than 100 primitive words have been unpacked in this way, but this has substantially increased the redundancy of the language...something that more than one linguist had warned us we must do.
A third kind of addition made since 1975 was to the grammar. Loglan grammar is now demonstrably unambiguous. The grammar of the 1975 language was not ambiguous in any known way, of course; but there were undoubtedly several unknown ways in which it was ambiguous since, at the time it was built, no algorithm existed by which syntactic ambiguity in a human language could be exhaustively detected. In 1975, however--which was the same year in which our own two books were published--a trio of mathematicians at Bell Laboratories, Alfred V. Aho, Stephen C. Johnson, and Jeffrey D. Ullman, announced their discovery (Aho, Johnson and Ullman 1975) of a constructive-proof algorithm that was capable of demonstrating that a given grammar of a certain formal type--one of interest to computer science for designing programming languages--was unambiguous if it happened to be; and if the given grammar was ambiguous, then the same algorithm was capable of locating all the sources of ambiguity in it. This powerful tool--augmented by some formal constructions of our own for dealing with the grammar of a speakable language--enabled us to write an unambiguous grammar for Loglan by 1982.
The "machine grammar" project, as we called it--or sometimes simply "MacGram"--was perhaps the most scientifically interesting engineering project of the 1978-88 period. Many of our new loglanists were programmers or computer scientists. One of their interests in Loglan, it turned out, was that it seemed to them to be a promising candidate for the "interface language" between humans and their machines that such workers were then and are apparently still looking for. (There is more on this topic in Chapter 1, Sec. 1.5.) But it was quickly pointed out by these new partisans of the project that unless Loglan grammar was demonstrably unambiguous, the language would be useless as an interface. Besides, syntactical non-ambiguity had an important Whorfian function as well, one that had long been recognized: it would make implausible ideas speakable and hence examinable. Since many important ideas are at first sight implausible, a grammar that would permit them to be uniquely spoken would be just one more step toward liberating the language-bound human mind...if, indeed, the human mind is language-bound as Whorf and Sapir suggest. Accordingly, it was in the service of both releasing Whorfian effects and preparing Loglan for its potential interface function that the Aho-Johnson- Ullman theorem was used to stabilize this important property of the language.
Loglan was first shown to be syntactically unambiguous in February 1982. There is still, of course, some ambiguity left in the language, namely the kind by which an old meaning of a word may be extended metaphorically to convey a new one. Indeed, there must be exactly this kind of metaphorical ambiguity in any language if its lexicon is to grow. But since 1982, every well-formed Loglan utterance has had one and only one grammatical interpretation. Moreover, in the seven years since 1982, Loglan grammar has been kept demonstrably unambiguous more or less continuously, despite a series of significant expansions in its grammatical domain. In short, the language has grown. More things are sayable in it than have ever been sayable before. But its grammar has stayed unambiguous. The techniques for maintaining unambiguous languages in unambiguous states are now well-understood. Therefore there is every reason to believe that Loglan will remain unambiguous for as long as we wish it to be.
Curiously enough, the disambiguation of Loglan grammar has not altered it in any essential way. Instead, and true to the general pattern of change through augmentation that has characterized the development of the language throughout the last fourteen years, all that has visibly happened to the grammar of the language is that a number of new punctuation words and linkage patterns have been added. These allow the speaker who wishes to speak intricately and yet clearly to use the spoken punctuation marks and linking words of Loglan to maintain the structural clarity of even very complex speech. Essentially, this is all that has been added. So the principal learning task of the returning loglanist will be to add these new punctuating and linking schemata to the kit of old grammatical forms which he or she already knows.
Beyond these three kinds of structural additions to the language, there has been a considerable expansion of the lexicon. Once the principles of making borrowings flexible and complex words both recognizable and decipherable had been established, the way was clear to expand the lexicon in two quite different directions: one, toward increasing the richness of ordinary speech and writing by the spontaneous addition of new complexes, and two, by demonstrating that Loglan can incorporate the lexical precision of modern science and technology simply by borrowing the already existing international vocabulary of science.
Summing up, there have been six kinds of growth in Loglan since 1975: (1) The body of tested usages has grown from near-zero to a substantial and still-growing list of standard communication forms. Some of these amount to the solutions of interesting philosophical problems. How does one say 'X is two-legged' in a logical language? Once solved, the solutions to such problems are available to other speakers at no analytic cost. (I have acknowledged the authors of such solutions in the end-of-chapter notes.) (2) All complex predicates are now decipherable. So new ones may be added ad libitum in full confidence that one's auditors or readers will be able to perceive one's poetic intent. (3) Borrowing has also become flexible, with the result that words like iglu and bakteriorodopsini may be added to the language virtually at will. Indeed, the international vocabularies of science, travel, and gastronomy seem in principle to have been already incorporated into Loglan. (5) Loglan utterances are now demonstrably unambiguous. This means that the man-machine interface potentialities of Loglan, which have always existed in principle, are now ready to be exploited in practice. Finally (6) by using the new word-making facilities, the Loglan lexicon is now ready to be expanded into any size we wish it to be.
The scholarly debt I have accumulated since 1969 is smaller than the one I owed in 1969, if only because, in the last ten years, the project has moved out of the design phase into the engineering phase of human linguistics; and little if anything was known about deliberately building selected properties into human languages before we began this work. Our profoundest debt for this period of our work is, of course, to Alfred V. Aho, Stephen C. Johnson, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (1975) for their discovery of a constructive-proof algorithm for testing ambiguity in LALR(1)-type grammars. We are also indebted to Stephen C. Johnson (1975) for his implementation of this algorithm in an automatic parser generator called YACC (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), a property of Bell Laboratories. YACC was the centerpiece of our own grammar-building tool, which we called LYCES (Loglan Yaccing & Corpus-Eating System; Brown 1982).
My debt to my fellow unpaid workers for The Loglan Institute, and to the members of The Institute who, through gifts and dues, have funded my occasional research assistants, is both collectively incalculable and immense. Given the failure of The Institute to win academic funding for our work, I would be at it still were it not for these open purses and helping hands. In particular, my warmest thanks go to William E. Dorion, Robert J. Hampton, Michael E. Pique, and Nora Tansky, whose uncommon acts of financial generosity have amounted over the years to small grants in aid of research.
In that same connection, thanks go again to my publisher, Parker Brothers, and to the several generations of children who played my game Careers over the past thirty-odd years. The Careers-income provided a steady subsidy of Loglan research for as long as Careers stayed on the market, as it did from 1956 through 1982. Uncomplainingly, one might say, this most simple-minded of my intellectual children has supported its higher-browed but slower-maturing (and commercially less sprightly) siblings.
My thanks also go to the handful of scholars who co-signed with me, or in some other way publically supported our 1977 research proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). These include Profs. John R. Atkins, Charles J. Barton, John B. Carroll, John H. Chalmers Jr., Carol M. Eastman, William R. Edwards Jr., John M. Jacobsen, John Parks-Clifford, and Willard Van Orman Quine, as well as Ms. Elizabeth A. Edwards, Dr. Rudolf W. Meijer, and Mr. Charles Nieukerke.
Earliest, then, were the members of the Loglan Sogrun which formed in the Spring of 1972: Vivian Adkins, James A. Bush, Rush Elkins, J. Michael Gilmer, Tad Hanna, Carolyn Marshall, Michael Pique, Stephen Simmons, Frances Stein and G. Thomas Wells. Together we had the first experience of using the language as an instrument of everyday life.
To the team of four then-young linguists--Donald Albury, Fillmore Clark, James Flege and Barbara Smith--who helped me expand the 1969 dictionary into the 1975 one in 1973-74, my grateful thanks for a massive job well-done. Also, thanks go to Gustavo Arcia, Hsuan Fuang, Drs. V. Gusew and K. Naribaev, and to Luke Yu who, as native speakers of languages other than English, consulted with me on the 1975 dictionary project. Also, I want to express my indebtedness to Marie Fugate for key-punching the 50,000 cards from which the 1975 dictionary was printed, and to Philip Schwartz who helped me program it and put it all on tape. Thanks also go to Eugene Garelick, Tad Hanna, and Carolyn Marshall for their work in correcting the 1969 dictionary and readying it for the 1973-74 editorial team.
My special thanks go to my four apprentices of the period 1977-78. These four not only helped me make the to me epochal discovery that Loglan was speakable, but helped me understand its problems. They were Robert K. Jenner, Patrick Mears, Scott W. Layson, and John Parks-Clifford. It was with these speakers that the first sustained Loglan-only dialogue was experienced.
Thanks as well as admiration for the job he did go yet again to John Parks-Clifford, who served as Editor of The Loglanist from 1976 through 1983; pc, as he was known, served also as the guide and counselor of the throng of explorers whose reports filled its pages. Somehow he found the time in a busy teaching schedule to marshal, order, and periodically adjudicate the results of their often boisterous efforts.
I am of course also grateful to the explorers themselves, the contributors to The Loglanist during the Years of Invention (1976-81): John R. Atkins, Charles J. Barton, Samuel Bassett, C. R. Berman Jr., David M. Bowen, Douglas Brown, Jeffrey R. Brown, James F. Carter, John H. Chalmers Jr., David Chapman, Stephen Chapman, Robert J. Chassell, Martin Clay, Thomas A. Crispen, Richard C. Darwin, Daniel Dassew, Robert D. Davidson, Paul Dickson, Christopher Dollin, Colin Fine, Jerome Frazee, William Freiday, Asha Goldberg, Henry A. Grady Jr., Donald Graham, Douglas Hainline, Dean Hickerson, Charles Hixson, G. Huyck, Robert K. Jenner, James Jennings, Ronald W. Johnson, Mel E. Kanner, Richard Kennaway, Thomas Kent, George Kirk, Andrew Koenig, David Kreig, Mathew A. Kupstas, Douglas Landauer, Neil Langley, Ida M. Larsen, Scott W. Layson, Robert Levin, Eric Leventhal, Sheldon Linker, Douglas Loss, Anthony S. Lovatt, Bruce J. MacLennan, Klim Maling, Rex F. May, Robert A. McIvor, William Mengarini, Rudolf W. Meijer, Mark Mickelson, David Milton, Richard Morin, Malcolm Mumme, Michael Oliver, Ross R. W. Parlette, David Platt, Jeffrey S. Prothero, Arthur Protin Jr., Keith Ramsay, Richard Rosenberger, John Schilke, James R. Spriggs, Guy L. Steele Jr., Nora Tansky, Rick Thomas, David Tomlin, R. W. Toy, Marianne Turlington, A. R. Walker, Birrell Walsh, Robert L. Williamson, Steve Witham and Keith Wright. In one way or another nearly all their contributions have become part of the language.
I wish also to thank my co-workers on the MacGram Project (1977-82): Scott W. Layson, who helped me finish it, Douglas Landauer, who helped test the early grammars, Sheldon Linker, who got us started, Robert A McIvor, who served as tool-maker, and Jeffrey S. Prothero, who labored through the middle watches. An allied project was the task of writing up, and coming to understand, our results. In this we were ably helped by David S. Cortesi, Christopher C. Handley and Richard Kennaway.
I wish to acknowledge here the expert assistance I received throughout the morphological engineering project of 1978-83--once called the Great Morphological Revolution, or GMR--from Robert A. McIvor again. In the course of his long association with The Institute RAM has worked on nearly all its projects. None of them would be so far advanced without him.
A large contribution was also made to the GMR project by the many loglanists who served as subjects in its numerous "taste tests". There are too many of these volunteer subjects to list here. But what we know about the morphophonemics of Loglan we largely learned from them.
In 1983 a test of the new morphology was undertaken that involved making several thousand new Loglan metaphors, and that project is still going on. We called it the Eaton Interface after the name of the scholar (Helen S. Eaton) whose (1940) work we used to guide it. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of these Eaton workers to the new lexicon, and especially that of their indefatigable chairperson, Faith Rich. At various times her fellow workers on the interface have been: Charles J. Barton, Thomas Birchmire, David M. Bowen, Jennifer F. Brown, Kieran Carroll, James F. Carter, Kenneth Dickey, Colin Fine, Jerome Frazee, William Gustafson, Ronald W. Johnson, Richard Kennaway, Robert A. McIvor, Michael E. Parish, John Parks-Clifford, Michael E. Pique, Edward Prentice, Nora Tansky, Jeffrey L. Taylor and Birrell Walsh.
I wish also to acknowledge the creative efforts of those who, at various times, have written computer software for The Institute: Glen B. Haydon, Mel E. Kanner, Richard Kennaway, Scott W. Layson, and Robert A. McIvor.
In recent years a number of experts have served as judges on our Science Words Project (1985-88): Dr. Soni Anderson Barker, Kieran Carroll, William Greenhood, Dr. Glen B. Haydon, Dr. Robert A. McIvor and Lawrence Proksch. Not experts in science but in Loglan morphology, Jennifer F. Brown, Paloma Ibanez and Faith Rich have joined them in this work. I thank them all for sharing their insights into the borrowing process with me.
From its inauguration in 1980 until the present, The Institute's newsletter, Lognet , has had a quartet of editors or editor-pairs: Edward and Julia Prentice, Robert J. Chassell, John Lees, and Michael E. Parish. The Loglan community is in their debt for yet another unpaid service.
At another level of service, I wish to acknowledge the gifts of time, concern, wisdom and, above all, patience that those who have served as officers, directors and/or trustees of The Loglan Institute have, in various mixes, bestowed on me and it through the years: Jennifer F. Brown, Jean M. Chalmers, Robert J. Chassell, Herschel Elliott, William Greenhood, Glen B. Haydon, Ted and Joy Keiser, Ida M. Larsen, John Lees, Robert A. McIvor, John Parks-Clifford, Nora Tansky, and Larry G. Turner.
To The Institute's procession of secretary/typists over the past fourteen years, who include Barbara Ghosn, Elissa Goforth, Cindi Hardesty, Mary Landauer, Donna Kiefel, Barbara Scanlan, and Adele Sheets, I wish to express my appreciation for the intelligence and skill that each has brought to this typographically demanding project.
I wish also to express my deep gratitude to the many scholarly readers who took time out of busy lives to read one or more chapters of this Fourth Edition in manuscript. The expert advice I've received from this multidisciplinary panel of readers--coming as they do from linguistics, medicine, psycholinguistics, anthropolology, philosophy, chemistry, computer science and the international language movement--has not only helped me find the errors in this multidisciplinary work, but also to see the work as a whole in an interdisciplinary perspective. These readers were Prof. John R. Atkins (anthropology), Prof. John B. Carroll (Whorf's editor and a psycholinguist), Prof. Carol M. Eastman (linguistics), Dr. William R. Edwards Jr. (computer science), Prof. Herschel Elliott (logic and philosophy), Dr. Glen B Haydon (medicine), Mr. Mel E. Kanner (computer science), Dr. Robert A. McIvor (chemistry), Mrs. Faith Rich (international languages), Prof. P. David Seaman (linguistics), and Dr. Guy L. Steele Jr. (computer science). I wish also to thank At. Elizabeth Alexander James, a professional writer, for her very useful comments on problems of style in a work of this sort. Ms. James has come to represent for me that most courageous of all readers, the general one.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the special contribution made by my two research assistants of the last few years, Paloma Ibanez and my daughter, Jennifer Fuller Brown. Both have brought uncommon deftness to everything they touched. I wish also to acknowledge the wide-ranging contributions of my wife, Dr. Evelyn R. Anderson. She has not only served as the on-board critic of my writing and helped push the production of the book through its many stages, she has also been the principal preparer of the input for our new teaching programs. Once again I am obliged to Dr. Robert A. McIvor, this time in his role as Loglan's Chief Grammarian, for standing by to help me solve the many grammatical problems that have arisen during this last year of our work together.
Loglan has indeed become a work of many hands.
1 In my English idiolect, as in Loglan and French, words like 'loglanist', 'loglandic' and 'loglandical' are general terms like 'cat' and 'dog' (i.e., common nouns or adjectives) and therefore uncapitalized, whereas words like 'Loglan' and 'Loglandia' are singular terms (words with single designata, like 'John' or 'Greenland') and therefore capitalized. Both Loglan and French are more fastidious about such logical matters than Standard English is.

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