I'm not a person who likes talking about himself, so I will limit myself to the necessary. My real name is Jan van Steenbergen, I was born on
June 3,
1970 (on the same day when
Hjalmar Schacht died), and I live in
Zaandam, near
Amsterdam. Educated as a specialist on Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, I've worked as a journalist, as a translator, and (currently) as a software engineer in a bank. My main interests are:
Poland and
Ukraine;
language, particularly
constructed languages;
Classical music;
history. I am mostly active in the
Dutch Wikipedia, under user name
IJzeren Jan. Here I will probably mostly be dealing with interwiki links, and perhaps small modifications of existing articles. Also, I might dig up interesting stuff to translate into
Dutch or
Polish.
My user name, IJzeren Jan literally means Iron Jan. How so? Well, during my student years I used to play computer games from time to time, and "IJzeren Jan" was one of my favourite nicknames I used in highscores. Later I almost automatically used it in my e-mail address, and now as my Wikipedia user name. Only much later I learnt that IJzeren Jan was also the nickname of my famous countryman
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who also happens to be the symbol of my native town
Hoorn.
I am the author of several constructed languages, two of which,
Wenedyk and
Interslavic, are listed in the English wiki. More about this and other things can be found on my home page,
http://steen.free.fr/ .
Loglan is a
constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the
Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr
James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a
language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. In 1960
Scientific American published an article introducing the language. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as
logical languages, which also includes
Lojban.
Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the
Logical Language Group to create the language
Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. Supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language, and Brown's Loglan, referred to as "TLI Loglan" when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-
trademarkability of the term Loglan was eventually upheld by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office, many supporters and members of The Loglan Institute find this usage offensive, and reserve Loglan for the TLI version of the language.
Loglan (an abbreviation for "logical language") was created to investigate whether people speaking a "logical language" would in some way think more logically, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might predict. The language's grammar is based on
predicate logic. The grammar was intended to be small enough to be teachable and manageable, yet complex enough to allow people to think and converse in the language.
Find out more...
I'm not a person who likes talking about himself, so I will limit myself to the necessary. My real name is Jan van Steenbergen, I was born on
June 3,
1970 (on the same day when
Hjalmar Schacht died), and I live in
Zaandam, near
Amsterdam. Educated as a specialist on Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, I've worked as a journalist, as a translator, and (currently) as a software engineer in a bank. My main interests are:
Poland and
Ukraine;
language, particularly
constructed languages;
Classical music;
history. I am mostly active in the
Dutch Wikipedia, under user name
IJzeren Jan. Here I will probably mostly be dealing with interwiki links, and perhaps small modifications of existing articles. Also, I might dig up interesting stuff to translate into
Dutch or
Polish.
My user name, IJzeren Jan literally means Iron Jan. How so? Well, during my student years I used to play computer games from time to time, and "IJzeren Jan" was one of my favourite nicknames I used in highscores. Later I almost automatically used it in my e-mail address, and now as my Wikipedia user name. Only much later I learnt that IJzeren Jan was also the nickname of my famous countryman
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who also happens to be the symbol of my native town
Hoorn.
I am the author of several constructed languages, two of which,
Wenedyk and
Interslavic, are listed in the English wiki. More about this and other things can be found on my home page,
http://steen.free.fr/ .
Loglan is a
constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the
Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr
James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a
language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. In 1960
Scientific American published an article introducing the language. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as
logical languages, which also includes
Lojban.
Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the
Logical Language Group to create the language
Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. Supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language, and Brown's Loglan, referred to as "TLI Loglan" when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-
trademarkability of the term Loglan was eventually upheld by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office, many supporters and members of The Loglan Institute find this usage offensive, and reserve Loglan for the TLI version of the language.
Loglan (an abbreviation for "logical language") was created to investigate whether people speaking a "logical language" would in some way think more logically, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might predict. The language's grammar is based on
predicate logic. The grammar was intended to be small enough to be teachable and manageable, yet complex enough to allow people to think and converse in the language.
Find out more...