This city will be destroyed, empty; the people are far away; the king is a howling dog by the unlistening stones.
Most of the membership fell away, and the journal, the
In the midst of all this, Bob LeChevalier, Nora’s future husband, sent in his check to become a member of the institute. He didn’t know any of the other members, having been exposed to Loglan only through Brown himself, and he had no idea what was going on. Bob had been living in the San Diego area (where Brown—and the institute—were located in the late 1970s), and a friend of his, who was interested in Loglan, came to visit and decided to look Brown up in the phone book. Brown invited him over to talk, and Bob gave his friend a ride. “I knew nothing about language or linguistics and wasn’t really interested, either,” he told me. “I was just the transportation.”
But he ended up enjoying the conversation that evening and kept in touch with Brown, visiting him occasionally to talk about Loglan or to assist him with other projects, such as testing out a new board game he was working on. Soon, he was a member of the institute and was assigned the task of putting together a digital dictionary.
Bob moved to the D.C. area to take a job as a computer systems engineer for a government contractor, and Brown moved back to Gainesville, but they had long talks on the phone, during which Bob tried to explain why he wasn’t making much progress on the dictionary and Brown encouraged him to try harder. In 1986, Brown became ill with a life-threatening infection. “I called Jim in the hospital, and we talked about Loglan,” Bob told me. “It seemed like he had had a taste of mortality, and he was worried about what would become of the project—like this might be the last chance.” When he recovered, Brown invited Bob to Gainesville, and they spent a very intense weekend working on the language together. Bob was flattered; he felt like he was being treated as a full partner. Brown was preparing to sail across the Atlantic, and Bob left with the sense that he had been handed some sort of responsibility for the legacy of Loglan. He returned to D.C. full of renewed energy for the dictionary project, and a determination to do everything he could to please his mentor by helping Loglan succeed.
He decided to organize some local user groups where people who were interested in Loglan could get together and brainstorm, coordinate projects, and help each other learn the language. He began to contact people; Brown had given him a few names, and he found some others in old Loglan publications. Someone directed him to Nora, who was still an institute member (she had sent in a second five-hundred-dollar donation in 1984, so her membership was paid up for at least a decade) and lived not too far away in Philadelphia. They talked on the phone for hours, and a few weeks later she came down for a visit so they could work together on updating a Loglan flash-card program she had written. When Bob asked the former editor of the institute newsletter, which hadn’t come out in about a year, for some addresses of other Loglanists, the editor sent him the entire mailing list. Bob used it to mail out an update on the work he and Nora were doing, and issued a rallying cry for other Loglanists who were near each other to establish their own working groups. From some of the members who were no longer active, he collected half-completed computer programs and bits of other work and started recruiting volunteers to revive these projects.
Over Labor Day weekend, Bob hosted the first annual Logfest at his house. About ten people showed up with sleeping bags, but not much sleeping went on, as they stayed up all night snacking on cold cuts, hashing out ideas, and trying to see how far they could go with live Loglan conversation (not very far, it turned out, but it was a start). They also did a detailed group review of a revised description of the language that Brown had asked one of them to have a look at. Bob put together a complete report of everything that had been accomplished over the summer, more than a hundred pages of comments and materials, and, with a rush of exhilarated pride, mailed it to Brown, who was due back any day from his sailing adventure.
When Brown did get back, about a week later, he exploded in fury, yelling at Bob over the phone, accusing him of stealing the mailing list, of making a power grab. “I told you to work on the dictionary! I didn’t tell you to contact anyone! I didn’t tell you to review that draft.” He accused Bob of consorting with “enemies” and “fomenting a revolt.” Bob, flattened with bewildered disappointment, struggled to explain that he was only trying to be helpful, and spent the next four hours apologizing. At the end of their discussion, he was back in Brown’s good graces, but very tenuously so.
And not for long. When Bob and Nora finished the flash-card program (they had been spending more and more time together), they told Brown they were planning to distribute it as shareware on a computer bulletin board so that other Loglanists could take advantage of it. Brown informed them they would do no such thing. Loglan was the property of the institute. He would consider letting them distribute the program only if they signed a statement of acknowledgment that the institute owned the copyrights to the language and agreed to pay the institute royalties.
Bob wasn’t so sure
In March, Bob proposed to Nora in Loglan and she accepted. In April, when Bob ordered some Loglan materials for the class he was teaching, Brown sent his check back. Orders would only be filled for those who signed an “Aficionado Agreement” with a “non-disclosure” clause. When Bob explained to his students what had happened, one of them asked whether they could get around the copyright problem by just making up their own words and substituting them into Loglan sentences. Could they? It was worth a try.
On Memorial Day weekend Bob drove to Philadelphia to help Nora pack up her things and move her into his house in Fairfax, where two of his Loglan-interested friends were visiting. The four of them spent the rest of the weekend laying out a system for creating the new vocabulary, and Bob and Nora then spent their first summer together generating great heaps of paper in their “relexification” of Loglan, which they called Loglan-88. In August they hosted the second Logfest, where the attendees voted on whether it was worth splitting up this already small community in order to have the freedom to do what they wanted. They decided it was, 18–0.
Still, the split was not complete. Bob considered himself to be working on Loglan—Brown’s language—and he still held out hope for the possibility of reconciliation. In October, Bob and Nora married. On their honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg, in a demonstration of their commitment both to Loglan and to each other, they sustained a two-hour Loglan conversation. Most of it was spent trying to establish that each had understood what the other one said, as good a foundation for a marriage as any.
Upon their return, Bob redoubled his efforts toward his mission. He announced Loglan-88 at a science fiction convention, collected new recruits, and started putting out his own newsletter. A few weeks into 1988, “Jim had fifty Aficionados, and I had a mailing list of three hundred.” In March, he received a letter from Jim, notifying him that he was in violation of Loglan’s trademark (to be registered shortly) and that, should he not cease such violation, he risked being sued “for the recovery of profits, damages and costs, with, as you may know, the possibility of treble damages and attorney’s fees.”
With that letter, the gauntlet had been irretrievably thrown. Loglan-88 was officially renamed Lojban (from
