From lojbab@access.digex.net Sat Mar 6 22:45:10 2010 Date: Fri May 19 06:40:26 1995 From: Bob LeChevalier To: david_b@CLEO.MURDOCH.EDU.AU Subject: Re: Hello from a newbie X-From-Space-Date: Fri May 19 06:40:26 1995 X-From-Space-Address: lojbab@access.digex.net Message-ID: The reference grammar is still a (very) draft document, and no one has started to format it yet. John Cowan who is writing it, uses a straight ASCII editor. Therefore there should be no problems with print format without doing any formatting. Are you having any problems? The problem with formatting it now is that Cowan occasionally makes changes to the raw, unformatted file, since he is still the one that maintains them, and for the most part, i haven't even looked at them for publishing yet. Thus any formatting you do is a one time effort that is likely obsolete within a few months. If you decide to do any formatting, Word for Windows is the best way to go if you want to maximize recovery of your efforts, since Cowan and I both use WfW for our formatted efforts. Unfortunately, of course, the Unix-based people who seem to be about half of our audience on the List cannot do anything with WfW stuff, and generally prefer TeX/LaTeX formatting, which the people of the MS-DOS world find less than useful most of the time. But even using WfW is not guaranteed to make your stuff reusable. The draft tense chapter of the reference grammar was formatted and published as part of an issue of Ju'i Lobypli a couple of years ago, but the formatted version is not being supported since Cowan has made heavy changes to the unformatted text. At this point, only the tense and negation papers of the reference grammar are available in (formatted) print, and in both cases those are old versions of the document. Of course, coming from the Loglan world, using obsolete reference materials is the norm, since even the latest edition of L1 (which was poorly edited) has been made obsolete by countless undocumented or minimally documented changes to the language. We don;t have formatted printed documents, for some stuff, but the reference grammar and the YACC grammar pretty much constitute our current language definition and are thus ARE the standard for what the language is right now. Since you say you are familiar with Loglan, BTW, you are already familiar with Lojban. The words have changed, but given direct word substitution of Lojban words for most TLI Loglan words, will give you a text with nearly identical grammar and semantics in most cases. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@access.digex.net Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 For the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, see ftp.cs.yale.edu /pub/lojban or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/" Cc: lojban