From nsn Sat Mar 6 22:44:34 2010 From: nsn (Nick Nicholas) Subject: Re: temporary absense from net To: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1993 01:40:30 +1100 (EST) Cc: nsn (Nick Nicholas) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Message-ID: I'm back on the net, and apparently I'm on mullian for a bit. I'll try and convince the local guru to let me stay on mullian, as I'm officially an ElecEng postgrad (I'm doing Cognitive Sc via Elec this year); if not, I'll resurface on a CompSci machine. You'll be kept duly posted. I've mailed you $100 AUS ($66 US) for my LLG account, in an International Money Order. Nice to see the list talkative; pity I don't have the time right now to actively participate, but I think some sense of direction is arising from out the rubble. Place structure... well, it won't be a typical Cowan paper, all nicely didactic. The first section will have to be --- in which I show the basic manner of deriving place structures. It's basically your method: pick from the places of the component gismu those places which are relevant to the definition of the {lujvo se sinxa}; couple with some dikyjvo-derived ideas on how the places should be ordered for predictability by other users presupposing no familiarity with the {lujvo se sinxa}. However (and this need not delay dictionary production), I intend to use Ivan's classes of tanru as a tool in analysing which types of lujvo place structure go with which types of component tanru. Some clear patterns are already discernable. The write-up of the first section may start as soon as Friday, certainly next week. I'm finishing my summer job Friday, and start classes week after next. It is a pity things have turned out as they have with MEX. Personally I doubt MEX will ever be worked through to our satisfaction. I'm not sure which action I should take given John's reluctance to confront me on my usage. I'm tempted to produce more MEX {zirjbo} :) and force matters to a head --- but if John is really taking matters to heart (btw, is he getting cc's of your mail these days?) then that's obviously not diplomatic. I have heard nothing from Johnstone (and no longer subscribe to conlang; my summer job has meant I've had to minimise net access time). Tim Mansfield I bump into every now and then; he's on soc.bi, and I'm his net Esperanto tutor. He's very busy with thesis work right now (haven't had Esperanto exercises from him in a month), but he was genuinely interested in Lojban. He made the inevitable proglang/conlang analogy: Lojban is to Scheme as Esperanto is to Pascal. (Having spent a month programming in Pascal, I wouldn't be too smug about that if I were an Esperanto-supremacist. On the other hand, I have a distaste for LISPoids. Incidentally, whatever happened to Guy Steele? It was only when I read _The Hacker's Dictionary_ that I realised we had a celebrity in our midst on lojlist in '90!) I offered to meet Jacques Guy earlier last year, but in our brief email correspondence, he doesn't seem really interested in Lojban: he finds it too complex for his needs. To tell the truth, a Basic Lojban could readily be constructed (and with our tendency to use transformational techniques and deep structures to analyse Lojban, such a Lojban would be a helpful bootstrap for the remainder of the language, as well as an interesting language in its own right: the *essentials* of Lojban are quite slim. Btw, I don't know how much putative scientific interest a Basic Lojban would have; I for one consider transformational accounts of language quaint, and in fact virtually all linguists these days do --- Chomsky has fled from it to GB, which to me seems like Ptolemaic epicycles.) Talk to you soon. "Kai` sa`n swqh~kan t'akriba` piota`, N N O nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au kai` sa`n plhsi'aze pia` [h [w'ra te'sseres, I I L IRC:nicxjo RL:shaddupnic sto`n e'rwta doqh~kan eutuxei~s." C C A University of Melbourne. K.P.Kaba'fhs, _Du'o Ne'oi, 23 E'ws 24 Etw~n_ K H S *Ceci n'est pas un .sig*