Spring 2018 Report on the State of the Loglan Language (official and provisional) M. Randall Holmes Version of 2/10/2017, 5 pm Mountain Time 1 Introduction This document is intended to be a comprehensive report on the state of the Loglan language as of Spring 2018. The Phonetics Proposal is now the only section on phonetics, including permitted phonetic shapes of words, and later sections have been reconciled with it (at least, a first pass has been made at this). I do attempt to distinguish between things officially approved and things which are still provisional, whether proposed by me or by others. A Lexicography Proposal now replaces the section on Word Forms (containing a lot of the content of the old section, rearranged and edited). I would like to encourage a decision to accept all or most of the provisional features at once, at least in principle, rather than continuing a very slow piecemal revision, but I do not insist on such an approach. By providing a reasonably structured overview of what I have done, I hope to encourage such an outcome, and the document should be useful in any case. The document contains an overview of the issues I perceived when I started working on overhauling the language in 2013 along with a high- level description of what I have done about them (officially or provisionally). Anyone in the Loglan community who sees oversights in this section (or any section) is welcome to tell me about them! This is followed by the entire text of the draft reference grammar (and it is in the context of this document that the reference grammar will continue to be maintained). The reference grammar is intended to give a complete description of the grammar and grammatical vocabulary of the language without the distraction of PEG notation. 1 Version of 2/10/2018, 5 pm Mountain Time 2 This is followed by three Appendices, the list of proposals before the Loglan Academy, taken from the Academy agenda document, and augmented with further draft proposals, followed by an annotated text of the PEG gram- mar, similar to what is currently embedded in the agenda document, but freshly prepared for this document [in some places I did copy in large chunks of annotations from the old agenda document], and the complete trial.85 grammar for reference. I am planning further editing of this document. For example, it would make sense to add comments about subsequent changes in the embedded copy of the trial.85 document. The reference grammar needs considerable work; it will be edited in situ in this document. I plan to add a small section before the annotated PEG grammar explain- ing how to read a PEG. Version of 2/10/2018, 5 pm Mountain Time 3 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Version Notes 6 3 A brief report, Fall 2016 11 4 A catalogue of issues 19 5 Introduction to the Reference Grammar Sections 33 6 The Phonetics Proposal 2017 34 6.1 Sounds . 34 6.1.1 Vowels . 34 6.1.2 Consonants . 35 6.1.3 Vowels pretending to be consonants . 36 6.1.4 Consonants pretending to be vowels . 36 6.2 Diphthongs and vowel grouping . 36 6.2.1 Mandatory diphthongs . 36 6.2.2 Optional diphthongs . 37 6.2.3 Expanded notes on diphthong pronunciation . 37 6.2.4 Grouping long streams of vowels in predicates and names 39 6.2.5 Grouping long streams of vowels in structure words . 39 6.2.6 Vowel pairs with optional grouping revisited . 40 6.2.7 Doubled vowels and stress . 40 6.3 The Loglan syllable . 40 6.3.1 Discussion of stress and notation for syllable breaks and degrees of stress . 40 6.3.2 Every syllable has a vocalic unit . 42 6.3.3 Like Gaul, every syllable has (up to) three parts . 42 6.3.4 Words must resolve into syllables . 43 6.3.5 Notation for consonant and vowel patterns . 43 6.4 Word Forms . 44 6.4.1 Word forms enumerated . 44 6.4.2 Pauses and word boundaries . 44 6.4.3 Structure words (cmapua) . 45 6.4.4 Name words and the false name marker problem . 47 6.4.5 Borrowed predicates . 50 Version of 2/10/2018, 5 pm Mountain Time 4 6.4.6 Complex predicates . 53 6.5 Appendix: Alien Text and Quotations . 56 7 Lexicography (a formal Proposal as of 2/3/2018) 57 7.1 Name Words (and Alien Text) . 58 7.2 Predicate Words . 60 7.3 Structure Word Classes Introduced . 61 7.4 Tight logical connectives: CA roots . 62 7.5 Letters, acronyms, and pronouns . 62 7.5.1 Remarks on acronyms . 64 7.6 Numerals and quantifiers . 65 7.7 Tense/location/relation operators . 69 7.7.1 The system of tense and location words . 74 7.8 Connectives . 78 7.8.1 Logical connectives for sentence components . 78 7.8.2 Sentence connectives and new utterance markers . 79 7.8.3 Forethought logical and causal connectives . 80 7.9 Articles . 81 7.9.1 Constructions involving alien text and related articles (see the appendix to the Phonetics Proposal for some modifications) . 82 7.10 Assorted grammatical particles, somewhat classified . 84 7.11 Words which form free modifiers . 86 7.12 Negation . 91 7.13 Essays on word-making, and on what a word is exactly . 91 7.13.1 Borrowing predicates . 91 7.13.2 Making complex predicates . 92 7.13.3 Name words . 93 7.13.4 Essay: what is a word? . 94 8 Grammatical Constructions 97 8.0.5 Note on Right Closers . 97 8.1 Sentences and Utterances . 97 8.1.1 The most basic sentences . 98 8.1.2 Logically connected basic sentences (and final argu- ments moved to the front) . 100 8.1.3 Free Modifiers and Utterances . 101 8.2 A semantic note: scopes of quantifiers . 106 Version of 2/10/2018, 5 pm Mountain Time 5 8.3 Predicates . 107 8.3.1 The basic building blocks of predicates: predunit classes107 8.3.2 Description predicates . 108 8.3.3 Sentence predicates, first pass . 109 8.3.4 Sentence predicates, second pass . 110 8.4 Clauses, arguments and term lists . 112 8.4.1 Serial names and the false name marker problem . 112 8.4.2 Arguments (including subordinate clauses) . 113 8.4.3 A semantic note on multiple reference of arguments . 118 8.4.4 Modifiers = relative clauses, prepositional phrases . 119 8.4.5 Terms, term lists, and termsets (including link sets) . 119 9 Appendix: The Current and Recent Active Proposals (and some draft proposals of mine in preparation) with Com- ments 122 10 The PEG implementing the Phonetics Proposal, the new provisional grammar (the following one is preserved because the comments are valuable) 140 11 The previous PEG test Grammar, fresh annotations com- pleted 191 12 Appendix: The Trial.85 Grammar 256 13 Appendix: old version notes for this document 279 Version of 2/10/2018, 5 pm Mountain Time 6 2 Version Notes 2/10/2018 removed nu- as an affix to A, CA, KA roots and added nuu, nucu, and nuku as root forms, producing the system in the Paradigms (which does not agree with LIP). 2/3/2018 Replaced the lexicography section with a formal proposal (which contains a lot of the old text). This is accompanied by some grammar mod- ifications, notably allowing more PA words, but it is mostly a matter of organization. The copy of the PEG grammar which is embedded in this doc- ument is now somewhat out of date: one should look at the commented PEG source available on my page. 12/18/2017 Put a description of the tests for the start of a predicate word without lookahead in the main text. Copy editing. I should note that the embedded text for the new parser should be replaced by now: considerable edits and debugging have happened. I made a small tweak which once again allows many of the weird possible borrowings with many vowels before the CC pair; very likely all of these should be banned, but the rule which was banning about half of them was not the right context in which this should be done. 12/16/2017 Added footnotes about the actual method of detecting the start of a predicate word, and the fact that this method enforces the rule about y-hyphenating initial CVC djiifoa without any special additional tests. 12/15/2017 Some light editing. 12/14/2017 I have merged some bits of the original sections on phonetics and orthography and the phonetic shapes of words into the Phonetics Pro- posal and eliminated the old sections, and I have read through the later parts of the reference grammar and made corrections determined by the Phonetics Proposal (of course I may have failed to notice some that need to be made!) 12/13/2017 This now contains a more or less readable version of the now official PEG based on the phonetics parser. This embedded text will not be updated often (it is rather laborious to do so) but it is available on the site in the latest version as a PEG. Its embedded comments are probably worth reading. I still need to reconcile the phonetics proposal with the rest of the refer- ence grammar! 12/12/2017 Massive provisional modifications to the text to temporarily signal the changes caused by the phonetics proposal. I am inserting the pho- netics proposal as a section (superseding the original phonetics description; Version of 2/10/2018, 5 pm Mountain Time 7 I'll eventually reconcile them into a single text), and inserting the new PEG as an appendix without eliminating the old commented PEG.