Introduction

🛈 This text contains linguistic syntax and formal semantics jargon. Some parts of this text are quite technical. There is also an abundance of diagrams depicting syntax trees. Simply ignore them if you don't find them useful. Learners of the language can get all the information they need from the written descriptions and especially from the many glossed example sentences. If you do find the trees useful, consider them a bonus.

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Earlier versions of the language

• The first version of Toaq was published in 2013 under the name Tòaq Dzũ, also known as Toaq Alpha.
• The next version, now under the name Toaq, was published four years later in 2017, and labeled as a public beta version.
• In 2021, the third major update was published, which has become known among members of the community as Toaq Gamma.

It has since become customary to refer to all versions of Toaq this way, making the present version Toaq Delta.

What kind of language is Toaq?

Toaq is a loglang. In the traditional language classification of constructed languages, loglangs belong to the class of engelangs (engineered languages). These are languages which are created with specific (objectively testable) design goals in mind. These goals are often highly experimental in nature. Many engelangs are intentionally artificial, either because they explore the boundaries of what a human language can be, or because they are not meant for humans in the first place. While Toaq certainly has a very clear set of goals, mainly due to its claim to loglanghood, and while it can fairly be called an engelang, it is expressly intended to be only as artificial as is necessary to meet the requirements of a loglang. The language is intended to be a human language, and this means that it should offer similar mechanisms as those found in natural languages, even if it does so in a more controlled fashion.

What is a loglang?

Loglang is short for logical language, which is a technical term with a specific definition, rather than describing any language that is "logical" in some way. In colloquial language, “logical” is often used in place of "rational", "regular", "predictable". However, the "logical" in logical language refers to the concept of Logical Form, the logical (semantic) representation of a sentence.

A loglang is a language which unambiguously bidirectionally encodes predicate-argument-structures such that any Phonological Form corresponds to exactly one Logical Form (i.e. every valid utterance has exactly one meaning) and every Logical Form corresponds to at least one Phonological Form (i.e. every meaning can be encoded in at least one phonological string).

For example, the Toaq sentence

Luı nuo sá tıqra nîe náokua.
'A tiger has slept in the bathroom.'

unambiguously translates to
∃x : tıqra_w(x). ∃e. τ(e) < t ∧ nuo_w(x)(e) ∧ nıe_w(e, náokua)

By the end of this text, you will know how.