Date: Tue, 10 Aug 93 22:55:58 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9308110255.AA28734@grebyn.com>
To: nsn@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU
Subject: Re: Where is our JL?
X-Mozilla-Status: 0010

Well, glad to see that Lojban is good for something, if only for drawing you in
a direction you seem naturally suited for - you seem a bit too personable to
grind away at drawings and designs without having much excuse for working
with others - and your work on multiple conlangs already told me you had a
grasp of language that is rare.

Thanks for the compliments, too.  Cowan did something similar at LogFest - one
of the few motions passed was one "thanking the officers of LLG for a job
well done".  Nora laughed since she hadn't done anything officerish since doing
the minutes from last years' LogFest, and pc didn't even participate in LogFest
either year %^)

I WANT to have the damned thing done well before the end of the year.
We'll have to see how the momentum goes.

There will be plenty of English language order stuff - you DID review the
outline, didn't you?  And you saw Cowan's KWIC processing of the gismu
list.  With that automatic processing and Nora and Colin working on keywords
(not necessarily unique) for each of the godzillion places of the gismu, we 
will get several thousand entries.  We will also hopefully be able to
turn your encoded place structures into something people can use without
necessarily having to look up the source gismu for the lujvo, as they would
have to now - and totally automatically.  Between KWIC, keywords, and
all your lujvo, we may have in excess of 10K English entries - I mean 10K
DIFFERENT English entries, since some E-words will generate multiple entries.

I intend to do more than one translation of a big list of words - that's what
the Eaton effort was all about, and it has 8000 words.  Then there is
Harrison's Multi-Conlang Dictionary which has a list of some 1000-1500 words
if I recall.  I don't know how many there are in your Esp-o based list,
of course.  I eventually want to tackle the Word-Tree, which is an on-line
tree-structured thesaurus of major acceptance in linguistics - it was done
by a Name in the field, George Miller at Princeton, and has significance in
cognitive research on semantics.  I havven't read the literature on it yet,
though I will.

Remember that I got into Lojban by being JCB's volunteer to edit the dictionary,
and my main interest is on expanding that dictionary enormously while keeping
and/or improving its qulaity level.  Once I get the initial books done, i 
suspect that will be a major area of my continued work.

lojbab