Latine sine Flexione - a "logical" language for international communication
by  Başak Aray

The mathematician Guiseppe Peano, known for his work on mathematical notation and his axiomatisation of arithmetics, also made use of logic for constructing a language. Inspired by the Leibnizean idea of universal characteristics, Latino sine Flexione was a reengineered Latin in the tradition of international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto. Its grammar embodies mathematical virtues such as simplicity, coherence and completeness. Peano argued that these qualities ensure the universality of a logical language and make it a better alternative for international communication than national languages ruled by a diversity of conventions.

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Increasing Expressive Power Through Language Planning –
The Case of Gender-Neutral Language

by Marcos Cramer

Some expressions cannot be translated perfectly from one language to another without modifying the meaning. From a logical perspective, this means that different natural languages can have different expressive powers with respect to certain domains of discourse. In this talk, I will focus on gender-neutral expressions for referring to people, which sometimes cannot be translated in a gender-neutral way to certain languages that encode gender grammatically or lexically. Due to changes in the societal understanding of gender, the lack of gender-neutral expressions in certain languages has been identified as a problem by certain members of the linguistic communities in question, which has led to planned extensions of the vocabulary and/or grammar of the languages in question, which have led to an increase in the expressive power of the languages in question. The pace at which such additions to a language disseminate seems to depend both on linguistic features of the language in question and on societal stances towards new forms of conceptualizing gender. Historically, language planning that increased the expressive power of a natural language occurs almost exclusively in the realm of technical language, but the novel gender-neutral expressions are not limited to technical language, so this instance of language planning seems to be a historical exception.

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Descartes to Mersenne: a letter on the feasibility of a philosophical language
by Federico Gobbo
Amsterdam, 20 November 1629, Descartes sends a short letter to Mersenne in response to his question on the philosophical or ‘perfect’ languages mainly proposed by British scholars and philosophers. Descartes does not propose a language project of his own; rather he clarifies why he does not do it. His reasoning still has something to say nowadays to the struggle of Interlinguistics. The talk aims to analyse the text and propose points for discussion.

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Lugamun, a principled "worldlang" created with algorithmic support

by Christian Siefkes 

A comparatively new and small category of international auxiliary languages are the so-called "worldlangs", whose vocabulary and grammar are based not just on the Indo-European languages, but also on languages from other language families. But the more diverse the source languages are, the more difficult it becomes to justify the decisions to use certain words, grammatical structures etc. Why use this particular variant, if another one might have been just as good or better? Lugamun is a (currently dormant) project for creating a worldlang. It relies on an algorithm to approach this problem in a systematic fashion on the basis of free online sources such as Wiktionary, the multilingual dictionary. For each term to be added to its dictionary, the words used in the various source languages are automatically converted to fit Lugamun's spelling and phonology, and then automatically ranked based on several criteria such as their similarity to the words used in other languages. By default, the best-ranked candidate is then added to Lugamun's vocabulary; another candidate can be chosen if preferable, but such choices must always be justified. In this way, it is possible to understand for each word the rationale motivating its choice. A similarly systematic process is used for developing the phonology and for selecting grammatical structures.

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