Logical language

From The Toaq Wiki
Revision as of 15:59, 11 July 2024 by Ntsékees (talk | contribs) (Adding alternative terminology and a mention of the companion goal of lexical unambiguousness.)

A logical language or loglang is a spoken language that is syntactically unambiguous in its encoding of logical forms[1].

There is some debate[2] about the exact definition of "loglang", and in its most general sense it may refer simply to a conlang that is somehow based on logic. Toaq calls itself a loglang in a rather strict sense compared to its predecessors Loglan and Lojban — see the blog post by Hoemaı[3]. The expressions "monoparsing language", "monosyntactic language" may be regarded as clearer alternative descriptions.

The "unambiguous encoding" implies that sentences in a loglang can be parsed and converted into their logical forms by a computer program. Kuna aims to do this for Toaq.

A frequent companion goal to syntactic unambiguousness among loglangs is lack of lexical homonymy and polysemy (at least when not resolvable through syntax alone), albeit this is arguably not a necessary feature of loglanghood.

See also

  1. Logical form on Wikipedia.
  2. Definitions of loglanghood on the Logical Languages Wiki.
  3. Logical language misconceptions, a blog post by Hoemaı about the definition of "loglang".
  • Montague grammar on Wikipedia: a 1960s attempt to, essentially, describe a fragment of English as a loglang.