Do you ever wish you could eliminate some of the ambiguity in English?
Have you felt that English wasn’t rationally constructed? Do you ever wonder, for instance, why we made “affect” and “effect” seem so similar when they mean two different things? Or why “you’re” are “your” sound identical, but are dissimilar in meaning?
Couldn’t we have designed something little bit more simple? About two decades ago, a group in Washington, D.C. attempted to do just that.
In 1987 the Logical Language Group began constructing a language based entirely on mathematical logic. As a foundation for their work, they used James Cooke Brown’s research from 1955. Brown had created a language called Loglan in order to test the effects of language on the speaker’s thought. The LLG adopted many of Loglan’s concepts to create their own language. Their goal was to invent a language that would be able to express complex ideas simply and without ambiguity. They aspired to remove the restrictions that ambiguity imposed on creativity, thought, and communication. By 1998, they had created an entirely new language according to those precepts: they named it Lojban. That same year they published a complete grammar and vocabulary of Lojban under the title The Complete Lojban Language.
