Zmavli Caimle

I would normally publish this on my blog, however, I thought that LessWrong people might be interested in this topic. This sequence is about my experience creating a logical language, Sekko (still a work-in-progress). What's a logical language? Languages can be divided into two categories: natural languages, which arise...naturally, and constructed langugages, which are designed. Of constructed languages, there are two categories: artlangs, which are designed as works of art or as supplements to a world (think Quenya or Klingon), or engelangs (engineered languages), which are designed to fulfill a specific purpose. Loglangs (logical languages) are a subset of engelangs. Not all engelangs are loglangs -- Toki Pona is a non-loglang engelang. Despite the name, what constitutes a "loglang" is rather undefined. It's more of a "vibe" than anything. Still, I'll try to lay out various properties that loglangs have: * Adherence to a logic system. Most logical languages have second-order logic. Toaq and Lojban have plural logic; Eberban has singular logic. * Self-segregating morphology (SSM). SSM refers to a morphology (scheme for making word forms) such that word boundaries can be unambiguously determined. Several schemes exist: Lojban uses stress and consonant clusters, Toaq uses tone contours, Eberban and Sekko use arbitrary phoneme classification. Sekko's SSM will be discussed in later posts. * Elimination of non-coding elements. Many natural languages have features which add complication but do not encode information. Examples include German grammatical gender, Latin's five declensions or English number and person agreement (i.e. "I am" vs "You are" vs "He is"; "It is" vs "They are"). Loglangs aim to remove non-coding grammatical elements like these. * Exceptionless grammar and syntactic unambiguity. Many natural languages have irregular forms. Examples include * Machine parsability. Basically all loglangs are able to be parsed to check for syntactic correctnes