From lojbab@lojban.org Mon Feb 22 06:56:21 1999 X-Digest-Num: 70 Message-ID: <44114.70.389.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 09:56:21 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Subject: Re: Funny loglan site At 11:35 AM 2/22/99 +0200, Robin Turner wrote: >From: Robin Turner > >la xod. cusku di'e > >> I wonder if there are any fluent Loglan speakers left, or if they've all >> died out. > >{zo'o} so we should get someone from the Summer Institute of Linguistics to >study them before Loglan undergoes language-death. There never were any fluent TLI Loglan speakers, nor are there any. In the 70s, JCB and a half dozen others who got togther for a month long group study managed to get to the minimal sustained conversation level, but this was with word lists in hand and constant deferral to JCB to help them find or coin a word that was needed. pc, one of those group-gropers, reports that the "conversation" was more noteworthy for multiminute pauses than for fluency. JCB himself was not fluent either. Indeed he has said that his daughter spoke the language better than he ever did. But she has been invisible to the Loglan community for 10 years and never showed a lot of interest in the language on her own. Nora and I were probably among the few to ever converse in TLI Loglan spontaneously. I proposed to her in TLI Loglan (we had not yet started Lojban development) and our wedding vows 6 months later were in TLI Loglan-with-some-Lojban-gismu (and we conversed several times during our honeymoon in the hybrid language of the time - there were by then around 1000 gismu remade, and each of us knew a subset of around 300 - a different subset. But the cmavo and grammar were still TLI Loglan). Of course Lojban IS Loglan (by decree of the LLG membership), and hence a fluent speaker of Lojban *is* a fluent speaker of Loglan, whether or not JCB would approve of our use of the label. TLI Loglan now seems to have a couple of people able to write or translate coherently (most notably Lognet editor Leith) - I would say with the skill that Jorge or Nick had 3 months after they started using the language. There is little interactivity that shows that people read what is written in Loglan without translation, and the language of the translation usually betrays so many English idiomatic fallacies as to be laughable. The TLI community is still ignorant of sumti-raising and underuses abstraction clauses. They are also prone to trying to phrase things in "logic-speak" with prenexes that are not accurate to the context - like they are translating the English into predicate logic notation for a first year logic course, and then translating the notation into TLI Loglan. This leads to overuse of universals, which seldom apply to the real world like they do in a logic-model. lojbab