And Rosta said:
> Mark Line:
>> Some things that popped up in a few recent posts made me squirm uneasily
>> and wonder what it is exactly that we all think a loglang *is*.
>
> _Loglang_ is polysemous.
> In one sense, it is an obsolete synonym for 'engelang'.
Wonder why it isn't 'engilang'...
> In another less redundant sense, it is strictly a 'logic(al) language',
> & I interpret that as being a language whose grammatical rules specify
> an explicit mapping from surface (phonological) forms to logical
> forms (propositions), with 'logic' understood as propositional
> and predicate logic or some analogue of it.
>
> If someone were to ask "Why fetishize logic by singling it out so",
> I would respond that it is an especially important ingredient of
> the syntagmatics of semantics, and that it could reasonably be said
> that by 'logic' what we really mean is the 'syntax of semantics'.
Actually, my next question would be "Why fetishize propositional and
predicate logic and its analogues?". It seems like there would be a lot
less impedance matching to do if a logic were chosen that was more like
language. (No natlang has variables. FOPC quantification does not map
straightforwardly onto any identifiable natlang phenomenon. So choose a
logic that gets by without variables and that does quantification like
natlangs do.)
-- Mark