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. | |||||
| 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 the process, 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 that of natural languages; its lack of ambiguity should, ideally, seem to be a perfect coincidence.
A very brief history of loglangs
Interest in a "mathematically planned human language" runs centuries into the past. Consider Leibniz's characteristica universalis, which inspired Frege's Begriffschrift, among others. 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, then speakers of a logical language would think more logically. Its successor, Lojban, furthered the 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, thus, proceeds more for its own sake than that of its predecessors.
Within the conlang community, people seem to disagree on what a "logical language" is: for some, merely being based in spirit on predicate logic is enough. By demanding of itself a syntax that's fully defined, unambiguous, and yet shaped like that of a natural language, Toaq has set the bar high. Can it be cleared at all?
Writing a parser
⟦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 that, we must thoroughly develop the syntax and semantics of the language. A few Toaq speakers have 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.
For Toaq to describe everyday situations, and for us to describe Toaq, we have to pick a theory of "events", a theory of "tense", a theory of "plurality/distributivity", et cetera. How many ideas from formal linguistics must we combine before our language can express anything we might want to say? Do they play nicely together in practice? If learning grammar means absorbing strict rules about scope and quantification, can humans learn to reliably produce correct sentences? In a way, we are determining if a language can be both human and formal.
Why bother?
| (pıunuım) skin-star "freckle" |
| (tıqshoaı) tile-wing "butterfly" |
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. The language stretches across academia, art, and fantasy.
The point is not to introduce Toaq as a new lingua franca, or to change how we think. Rather, it lets us explore a space where language meets logic and nature meets artifice. We let semantic theories roam freely in a constructed syntactic utopia. Ultimately, Toaq is a "conlinguistic" expression of a question all syntacticians ask: How do we say what we mean?
If any of this sounds meaningful, or even just fascinating — we'd be delighted to see you on Discord. Laojaı íme pó súq nha! 