Re: death of Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan

Matt Pearson wrote:

> For the uninitiated and midly curious:  What, in a nutshell, are the
> differences of opinion between the Loglanists and the Lojbanists?
Probably fewer and fewer.

The original difference was about the public or proprietary
status of Loglan: the proto-Lojbanists wanted a language whose
word lists, production rules, and so on were in the public domain.
At that time, the official Loglan position was that everything
was copyright, even the individual words, and that nothing could
be published in (not about, *in*) the language without official
permission.

To evade the arguments, the words were redesigned from scratch
in 1998, and the production rules rebuilt.  Lojban is the
descendant of that effort.  Since then, the groups have
not interacted very much, so further drift has occurred, but
relatively little.  For the most part, the languages remain
mutual relexes of each other, though some words have changed their
lexical semantics.  A bit of behind-the-scenes consultation has
led to some joint solutions to common language-design problems.

Litigation settled that the word "Loglan" is not a valid U.S.
trademark, and may be applied to Lojban or anything else.
Lojbanists claim to be part of the Loglan Project and use
the term "Loglan" generically, whereas Loglanists typically
exclude Lojban from the term "Loglan".  Many persons support
both efforts.

Since then the copyright issue has receded, as the official
Loglanists have adopted a relaxed attitude.  We now refer to
each other's web sites and so on.

Also, Lojban has a better reference grammar.  :-)

--

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)