Engineered language

Article summary

Engineered languages (often abbreviated to engelangs, or, less commonly, engilangs) are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages (or ideal languages), logical languages (sometimes abbreviated as loglangs), and experimental languages. Raymond Brown describes engineered languages as "languages that are designed to specified objective criteria, and modeled to meet those criteria". Some engineered languages have been considered candidate global auxiliary languages, and some languages intended as international auxiliary languages have certain "engineered" aspects (in which they are more regular and systematic than their natural language sources). == Logical languages == Logical languages are meant to allow (or enforce) syntactically unambiguous statements. They are typically based on predicate logic but can also be based on any system of formal logic. The two best-known logical languages are the predicate languages Loglan and its successor Lojban. They both aim to eliminate syntactical ambiguity and reduce semantic ambiguity to a minimum. In particular, the grammar of Lojban is carefully engineered to express such predicate logic in an unambiguous manner. Toaq and Eberban are also logical languages.

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