A Conlang Civil War: The Loglan vs. Lojban Schism

In the often quiet, academic world of conlanging—the art of crafting languages—drama is a rare commodity. Yet, lurking beneath the surface of meticulously designed grammars and carefully chosen lexicons is a story of conflict, rebellion, and intellectual division. This is the story of the Loglan-Lojban schism, a veritable civil war that tore a community in two and fundamentally changed the landscape of logical languages.

The Birth of a Hypothesis-Testing Tool: Dr. Brown’s Loglan

Our story begins in 1955 with Dr. James Cooke Brown, a sociologist, author, and visionary. Brown was captivated by a tantalizing linguistic idea: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In its strongest form, this hypothesis suggests that the language you speak doesn’t just express your thoughts—it actively shapes and constrains them. Could a person who speaks a language with no concept of time perceive the world differently? Could changing a language change how we think?

To put this bold idea to the test, Brown needed a special kind of tool. He envisioned a language completely stripped of cultural baggage and grammatical ambiguity, a language built on the principles of predicate logic. This language would be a “culture-free” zone for the mind. By learning it, he hypothesized, a person’s thinking might become more logical, more precise. He called it Loglan, a portmanteau of “logical language.”

For decades, Brown and a small but passionate community of followers worked on Loglan. The goal was ambitious: to create a perfectly unambiguous spoken language, where a sentence could have only one possible grammatical interpretation. Phrases like “the pretty little girls’ school” which are ambiguous in English (is the school little, or are the girls?) would be impossible in Loglan.

Cracks in the Foundation: The Seeds of Discontent

The early Loglan community was a hotbed of intellectual collaboration. Enthusiasts, many from the burgeoning fields of computer science and AI, contributed to refining the grammar and expanding the vocabulary. However, a central point of friction began to emerge: Dr. Brown’s absolute control.

Through The Loglan Institute (TLI), Brown maintained a tight, proprietary grip on his creation. He considered Loglan his intellectual property, his life’s work. While the community saw themselves as co-developers, Brown remained the final arbiter of every change. This led to immense frustration for several reasons:

• A Constantly Moving Target: Brown was a perfectionist. He was continually revising the language, meaning the grammar and vocabulary were in a constant state of flux. It was nearly impossible for anyone to become truly fluent in a language whose fundamental rules kept changing.

–

• Lack of a Stable Baseline: For years, the community pleaded for a published, stable “baseline” version of the language—a dictionary and grammar that would be frozen in time so they could finally learn and use it. These publications were repeatedly delayed.

–

• A Bottleneck on Progress: All development had to go through Brown. The community felt that this centralized control was stifling the organic growth and practical application of the language they were so dedicated to.

The Schism: A “Civil War” in Conlanging

By the mid-1980s, the tension had reached a breaking point. A group of prominent and long-time Loglanists, feeling that the project had stalled indefinitely, decided to take matters into their own hands. In 1987, they formed The Logical Language Group (LLG).

Their goal was not to destroy Loglan but, in their eyes, to fulfill its promise. They aimed to create a finished, stable, and usable language based on the principles of Loglan and—crucially—to place it entirely in the public domain. They wanted to create a language for everyone, free from the control of a single person or institution.

Dr. Brown saw this as an act of betrayal and a theft of his intellectual property. What the LLG saw as finishing the work, Brown saw as a hostile fork. He threatened legal action, asserting his copyright over the core grammar and, most importantly, the vocabulary (the root words, or “primitives”). The conlang civil war had begun.

Forging a New Path: The Creation of Lojban

To avoid a protracted legal battle and create a truly free language, the LLG knew they couldn’t just copy Loglan. They had to create a new language, one that was functionally the same in its logical structure but legally distinct. This new language was named Lojban (from logji bangu, meaning “logical language” in the language itself).

This led to a monumental effort to remake the language, focusing on two key areas:

1. The Lexical Remake

This was the biggest hurdle. Lojban could not use Loglan’s copyrighted root words. So, the LLG developed an algorithm to create a whole new vocabulary. They selected six of the most widely spoken languages as sources: Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic (Loglan had used eight, including Japanese). Candidate words from these source languages were fed into the algorithm, which generated new root words (called gismu) that were weighted by the number of speakers of each source language.

The result is a vocabulary that sounds familiar yet distinct. For example:

• To say “go”, a Loglanist uses gotso. A Lojbanist uses klama.

–

• For “blue”, Loglan has blanu. By coincidence, the Lojban algorithm also produced blanu, a rare and notable overlap.

–

• For “man”, Loglan uses mrenu. Lojban uses nanmu.

2. Grammar and Phonology

While the core grammar remained true to Brown’s logical principles, Lojban’s creators took the opportunity to streamline it. They simplified the phonology, making it easier for people from different linguistic backgrounds to pronounce. They also tweaked grammatical rules to make them more consistent and, importantly, even easier for a computer to parse, strengthening its potential for AI applications.

Loglan vs. Lojban: A Tale of Two Philosophies

The schism wasn’t just about words and rules; it was a fundamental disagreement on the philosophy of language creation.

Loglan remained the project of a single guiding mind, a tool for a specific scientific purpose, controlled and curated by its creator. Its legitimacy came from the authority of its founder.

Lojban became a community-driven, open-source project. Its legitimacy comes from its public-domain charter, its stable baseline (frozen in 1997), and its active community of speakers and developers. Its goals also broadened beyond just testing Sapir-Whorf to include use in artificial intelligence, as a potential international auxiliary language, and even for artistic expression like poetry and music.

The Legacy of the Schism

Today, Lojban has a significantly larger and more active community than Loglan. It boasts a wealth of online learning resources, a completed grammar, a stable dictionary, and an active user base that continues to explore its potential. Loglan still exists, maintained by The Loglan Institute, but it remains a much smaller, more insular project.

In a strange twist, the dramatic schism may have saved the logical language project. The conflict forced the creation of a stable, public-domain language that could finally be learned and used by anyone, anywhere. It transformed a stalled academic experiment into a living, evolving language. The story of Loglan and Lojban stands as a powerful testament to the passion of language creators and a fascinating case study in the eternal struggle between individual ownership and community collaboration.