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By Root 603 0

own a language? The law is still not really clear on that. The Loglan case did not settle the matter; it said only that the word “Loglan” could not be trademarked because at the time the trademark was filed (over thirty years after Brown had coined the word) it was already in general use as a “common descriptive term.” (The Loglan case would later be cited in a judgment against Harley-Davidson when the motorcycle company claimed that another company's use of “hog” to mean “motorcycle” was trademark infringement.) The Lojbanists were free to use the word “Loglan” to describe their project (though they continued to call it Lojban).

There is much more to a language, of course, than its name. At the beginning of the dispute (but not in court), Brown claimed he owned the rights to the vocabulary of Loglan. Did he? Brown did have copyrights on his books, including the dictionary. But copyright does not extend to each individual word in a copyrighted work, only to the particular configuration of the words. Would it have been possible for him to copyright each Loglan word sepa-rately? Perhaps, but he didn't; to do so would have been too costly and time-consuming (and useless, since the Lojbanists had already made their own words). In any case, such a strategy for language ownership has never been attempted, and it is not clear what the law would have to say about it if challenged in court.

There is yet more to a language than its words. Language is also a system, a set of rules for creating sentences and deriving other words. These rules were very explicit in Loglan, and they were the part of the language that had involved the most effort to develop. Can the rules of a language be owned? Probably not. You can patent a machine that uses a certain mathematical formula, but not the formula itself. You can own an implementation of an algorithm, but not the algorithm. There is, however, some blur in this area within the murky world of software patents, so given the right lawyer and the right judge, who knows?

There is one invented language that is essentially owned by a private company, though the terms of ownership have not been tested in court: Klingon is protected by a trademark held by Paramount Pictures. Without proper license, you cannot use the name “Klingon” to describe, say, a book of your own original Klingon poetry. But could you sell the same poems if you didn't explicitly call them “Klingon” poems? It's probably not worth it to you to find out, unless the sales of your poetry have somehow provided you with the resources to fight off a bottomless barrel of lawyers. As a practical matter, Paramount owns whatever aspects of the language they say they own. As a legal matter? Unless someone comes up with a very compelling reason to bring on the lawyers, we'll never know.

In his original Scientific American article, Brown set himself apart from the mad language inventors, with their Utopian missions and blindly confident claims, by presenting himself as the cool, impartial scientist. Clearly, he was anything but cool and impartial.

In the final few pages of the final chapter of his final book on Loglan, the revised grammar he published in 1989, we get a brief, illuminating glimpse of his unguarded ambitions when he launches into a breathless description of what might happen if the experiments showed that Loglan did indeed have a “mind-expanding, thought-facilitating” effect:

Wouldn't the entire experimental program, in fact, now be seen as a successful assessment of a proposed new educational experience, one that was available to everyone? It might even be seen as a treatment of a disease we didn't know we had! LLL, the disease of “logical language limitation,” or UNM of “unnecessarily narrowed minds” … And wouldn't Loglan itself then be seen as the gentle new cure for that ancient human malady? … An antidote for the bigotry with which even “civilized people” tend to view their neighbors in the global village? … This is what is very likely to happen given what the journalists will call a “positive” outcome of our Whorfian