From robin@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx Thu Feb 18 05:50:40 1999 X-Digest-Num: 64 Message-ID: <44114.64.244.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 15:50:40 +0200 From: Robin Turner Lojbanists are more international than TLI Loglanists, with maybe 30% of > our support outside the US, and a higher percentage of our active support. > Our best speakers include Jorge Llambias of Argentina, Nick Nicholas of > Australia, Goran Topic of Croatia, Ivan Derzhanski of Bulgaria, Veijo Vilva > of Finland, and Colin Fine of England. Our snail mailing list, if I ever > get it updated, will likely be close to 1500 people. > {.ui} Both the percentage of non-Anglophones and the numbers for the snail-mail list were larger than I expected. How many subscribers to this e-mail list, BTW? {zo'o} we could do some Esperanto mathematics here: add the two lists together, double the number on the grounds that some of these people represent entire families of Lojbanists, then add an estimate of the proportion of the population of China who have surely followed in the glorious path of Lin Zhemin and Lee Sau Dan (see postings on this topic in sci.lang). {ta'o.o'i} Don't get me wrong - I actually _like_ Esperantists, and would probably learn Esperanto if I only had the time. > Our weak link remains me. I am a parent very involved in raising my kids, > and don't have very organized work habits, so things get laid aside for > weeks at a time. Not to mention aviation, IIRC. {zo'o} Maybe lojbab. could trail a Lojban banner in the skies ;-) > My main priority is to get book orders caught up (I have > fallen behind again), and get our records in order. At the moment, I am > spending a couple hours a day on matters Lojbanic but the pile of paper is > deep, and too little is on computer where it needs to be. All the more reason for others to chip in. What happened to those people who were considering reworking the textbook? While "real" books are limited by the financial constraints lojbab. describes, we can stick as much stuff on the web as people can write. Another way people can raise interest in Lojban is through posting to other lists - I regularly mention Lojban on the AUXLANG list, and occasionally on sci.lang and alt.language.artificial. The thing here is to avoid evangelism, and simply make people aware of some of the more interesting features of the language - Lojban is _not_ in direct competition with Esperanto, Interlingua or whatever, and the "we've got the perfect language" idea is {pe'i} one of the reasons for the IAL movement being stuck where it is. {ta'o} funnily enough, the one language one might expect Lojban to be in competition with, now that Loglan is moribund, is Glosa, but in fact it's usually the Glosalists that I see eye-to-eye with most - we seem to share the same principles, but approach language design from opposite ends: Glosa strips the language down to the bare essentials, while Lojban tends to employ a "throw everything in and see what comes out" approach! As I've said before, I think it's still early days for Lojban - we need to do a lot more on seeing how the language works _in practice_ before getting into the mass market (if there ever is to be a mass market for conlangs, that is). In the meantime we can promote the language to people who are already have an interest in conlangs, or whose other interests (philosophy, AI etc.) might make them "natural Lojbanists". co'o mi'e robin.