What is Toaq? (for linguists)

This article explains Toaq's origin and goals to an audience of linguists.

What is Toaq?

Kaqgaı	jí	náq	choq	lô	jaokaqbıu.
see	1sg	the\man	use	of\the	telescope
I saw the man [who's] using the telescope.

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Kaqgaı	jí	náq	chôq	jáokaqbıu.
see	1sg	the\man	adv\use	the\telescope
I saw the man [by] using the telescope.

This wiki is about a constructed language called Toaq. Constructed languages, like Esperanto or Toki Pona, are those deliberately created by people for some purpose. Toaq is developed and spoken by a small community of hobbyists.

Toaq's primary goal is to be free of syntactic ambiguities like Everybody saw somebody or I saw the man with the telescope. The syntax of Toaq is carefully designed so that every sentence has precisely one meaning. Thus, its syntax-to-semantics transformation can be implemented as a deterministic computer program.

In this endeavor, Toaq tries to preserve a high degree of humanism. It would be simple to achieve our goal by assigning a phonology to a set of mathematical symbols, but such a language wouldn't look anything like human language, and would be difficult for humans to speak and process. Toaq's syntax is modeled after natural languages; the unambiguity should ideally seem to be a perfect coincidence.

Toaq's origin

Interest in a "mathematically planned human language" can be traced back centuries into the past: consider Leibniz's characteristica universalis, which inspired Frege's Begriffschrift. Concretely, Toaq's lineage can be traced back to Loglan, developed by James Cooke Brown in the 1950s to investigate the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. The idea was roughly that, if language shapes thought, speakers of a logical language would think more logically. Its successor, Lojban, furthered this effort, and its designers hoped that it would see use as a machine interlingua: a syntactically unambiguous language that would put humans and computers on a level playing field for communication.

In the past half-century, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has become largely disfavored, and advances in artificial intelligence show us that computers have no trouble engaging meaningfully with natural language, no matter its syntactic ambiguity. Toaq's development, then, is more for its own sake than that of its predecessors: We are constructing a curious linguistic object.

⟦Jıa de máq nha⟧
= ⟦nha⟧(⟦jıa de máq⟧)
= PROMISE(⟦jıa⟧(⟦de máq⟧))
= …
= PROMISE(λ𝘸. ∃𝘦. τ(𝘦) ⊆ t ∧
    beautiful.𝘸(a)(𝘦)) | t > t₀ | inanimate(a)

Can a language with Toaq's stated primary goal even exist? To prove that it can, we must write a complete parser; to do so, we must thoroughly develop the syntax and semantics of a language. In developing this parser, a contingent of Toaq speakers has taken an amateur interest in natural language semantics. A human-oriented language whose syntax is small and unambiguous turns out to be an attractive testbed for implementing semantics research. How many ideas from formal linguistics must we combine before our language can express anything we might want to say, and our software can correctly annotate it? Can humans learn to reliably produce correct sentences, when learning grammar means absorbing strict rules about scope and quantification?

Why bother?

Toaq's secondary purpose is to be aesthetically pleasing. Its speakers are excited about language and language creation. Its phonology and lexicon are designed from scratch. Engaging with Toaq can mean anything from contributing software, to inventing interesting words, to making beautiful calligraphy. We are as indebted to Montague as we are to Tolkien. In this way, Toaq is a sort of sociolinguistic art project.

The point is not to introduce Toaq as a new lingua franca, or to change how we think. Rather, we play in the space where language meets logic and nature meets artifice. We let semantic theories roam freely in a syntactic utopia. Ultimately, it's a playful and fantastical way to ask ourselves the same question all syntacticians do: How do we speak what we mean, and what do we mean when we speak?

Learning a language is a large effort, but you don't have to commit to enjoy participating. If any of this sounds meaningful, or just fascinating — we'd be delighted to see you on Discord. Laojaı íme pó súq nha!