Loglan Online

How to Read an LOD Entry

The Loglan Dictionary ought to be pretty easy to use for basic translation work. However, it does contain a lot of specialized notations that the serious wordsmith might be curious about. This is where you can look up those notations.

• Loglan to English
  • Parts of the Entry
  • Technical Information About the Word
    • Affixes *
    • Word Type
    • Word Origins
    • Authorship
    • Rank
  • The Definitions
    • Usage
    • Grammar
    • Number of Places
    • Case Tags
• English to Loglan
• Tables:
  • Word Types
  • Some Common Usages
  • Grammar Codes
  • Case Tags
  • Authors

Loglan to English

Like any dictionary, the Loglan Dictionary has certain conventions in how it presents its information. Consider the word "kliri".

Parts of the Entry

There are four parts:

• The first line has the word itself, in this case, kliri.
• Next is some technical information about the word. kli <4/4E clear;  4/5J kirei;  3/4S clar o;  3/4F clair;  3/4G klar;  3/5R liegk ioi>  49% C-Prim L4 '75 1.0
  
• The next one or more lines is a list of various definitions for the word. (2a) G is apparent/lucid/clearer/more transparent than J, fig. understandable. [G-J]
  ...
• Lastly, some words end with a list of other words. These are the complexes (a kind of compound word) that the word is used in. Used in: bliklimao; bliklimazmao; klicea; klimao; klimaosio; klimaosismao; klimaoste; klinorbli; klisupta; klivia; norkli; norklicue; pertyfeokli; sanklimao;
  

The kind of information that appears in each of the parts will depend on the kind of word it is. The "meat" of Loglan are the meaning carrying words called predicates and, not surprisingly, the LOD has information about predicates that it doesn't have about other kinds of words.

Technical Information About the Word

The second line contains information about the word. This information may include:

The Definitions

The body of each definition has some English text that describes what the word means. (E.g. "clearly, as a predicate modifier.") Some definitions of predicates are written as complete sentences with the "arguments" replaces by capital letters, the case tags. (E.g. "G is apparent/lucid/clearer/more transparent than J") (See Loglan 1 Section 4.31.) Certain emphasized words (such as "apparent" here) are the key meanings of the word.

English to Loglan

The English to Loglan part of the dictionary has the same information but rearranged. For example, the entry for "energy" is:

There is no "word information" line (We're not going to tell you where the English word came from.) although the "word origins" information appears in one place ("<action full>") to tell us where the complex kaoflo came from.

There is one other change: The pu — entries have an extra case tag in front, "B". That is because abstraction operators like pu can be thought to add an extra place to the predicate. (See Loglan 1 Section 3.10.)

That's about it, except for the lists below.

Tables

Word Types

Some Common Usages

Here are some common usages. The forms that could actually appear are infinitely varied, and the best reference for that is the text Loglan 1.

Grammar Codes

These are the abbreviations that indicate the part of speech a definition represents.

Case Tags

A list of case tags, taken from Loglan 1, Table 4.1.

Common Authors

Here are the initials of the various authors of individual words. As you can see, we're still tracking these down.