After spending the early 1960s devoting his full attention to Loglan, Brown put out some materials on microfilm, intending to make them available to the scientific community for review. He did receive one review in a top-tier linguistics journal, but it was not something he would have wanted to emphasize to the grant committee. Though the reviewer praised the project for its ambition and ingenuity, he threw serious doubt on its usefulness as any kind of scientific tool. The general verdict on Loglan was that it was an interesting, fascinating, and diligently executed … hobby.
Shortly after that, Brown left the country, losing contact with many of the people who were working on the language with him. He had divorced his third wife, a former student of his at the university who had done much of the work calculating the “learn-ability scores” for his Loglan vocabulary, and, in order to evade a custody dispute, took their toddler daughter to Europe and didn’t return for a few years (his ex-wife wouldn’t see their daughter again until she was a teenager). Loglan took a backseat to other projects—he wrote a Utopian science fiction novel and worked on something he referred to as a “statistical study of interpersonal relationships.” He got married again, this time to a woman who was one of his (openly acknowledged) mistresses during his previous marriage (his “progressive” politics carried over into the realm of sexual relationships, though in a rather one-sided way). When that marriage fell apart, he came back to the States and published a revised version of his Loglan grammar and dictionary, this time in book form, and purchased an advertisement for it in Scientific American.
The book stirred up interest again (many readers had been waiting for it since the 1960 article), and soon Brown had a group of followers who were willing to devote their time and skills to developing and promoting Loglan. Most of these volunteers were “computer guys” (Nora being the rare non-guy among them) who were excited about the possibility of the language serving as a human-computer interface. Brown also became excited about such a possibility and, after his first NSF grant proposal was rejected, put together “A Proposal for the Establishment of a Service/Support Relationship Between the Loglan Institute and the U.S. Computer Industry,” in which he asked “the industry” to provide the institute with “approximately $275,000 per year.” He expected them to fork over the money for the general good of the industry (surely, he emphasized, having a human-machine-interface system made available would benefit them all); exclusive rights to use any “proprietary information” would remain with the institute. Apparently, there were no takers.
So in 1979, Brown turned the institute into a “membership-controlled corporation,” and most of the Loglan volunteers, around a hundred people, paid the fifty-dollar fee gladly. This would allow them to at least hire a permanent secretary while they worked on what Brown called “the Commercial Success Project,” from which, he declared, all the members would eventually benefit.
There had never been any question among the Loglan volunteers that Brown was in charge. It was his language and he had the last word. But when they became paying members of his ostensibly membership-controlled corporation, they naturally expected more of a say in the development of the language. Under Brown’s direction, they began an overhaul of the rules of Loglan word formation (something still referred to in Loglan lore as the Great Morphological Revolution) and developed their own opinions on the best way to proceed. However, Brown proved unable to relinquish any control, even going so far as to prohibit the members from discussing (in their newsletter) any issues he had not personally approved for discussion. In 1984 his mounting ledger of perceived slights and disloyalties drove him to make belittling personal attacks on the very members who had donated the most time to the Loglan cause. When the board objected, he fired the board, ordering them to have nothing to do with Loglan for one full year, after which time, if they made suitable apologies, they would be allowed back.
In the newsletter, a member named Birrell Walsh expressed sadness that Brown was “driving away ALL those who appreciate the magnificent thing he had built,” and asked, “Do we owe it to Jim to give him a chance to wake up before he empties Log-landia?” His answer, like that of everyone else, was no. He concluded with a striking example of Loglan in action, an original poem:
le sitci fa nu kalhui ea nirve i lo nu gunti vu darli i la ganmre vi krakau va lo nortei troku
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 Loglanist, shuttered its doors for good.
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.