From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Thu Sep 28 17:23:12 1995 Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id RAA24985 for ; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 17:23:09 -0400 Message-Id: <199509282123.RAA24985@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v0.1a) with SMTP id 802AC8A6 ; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 16:47:04 -0400 Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 14:28:16 -0600 Reply-To: Chris Bogart Sender: Lojban list From: Chris Bogart Subject: Re: Criticisms and Parts of Speech To: lojban@cuvmb.bitnet Status: OR >(beginning lojban students may wish to skip towards the end of this >message for an article on parts of speech that may be helpful.) This was great! I wish I'd had some materials like that when I was learning. A few comments on it: - It still had a problem I noticed when I was reading the textbook: when you get talking about sumti, selbri, and bridi the first time, they're all used intermingled in sentences right off the bat, and it gets a bit bewildering, since it took me a while to remember which one meant what. It's good to get students learning the terminology right off, so maybe a printed version of the textbook ought to have a sidebar with those definitions on the first few pages where they're used, so they can refer back to it as they try to plow through the paragraph the first few times. - I like your alternate form for specifying place structures, although I think once students get used to it, the traditional form is more compact and better for reference. You should also explicitly point out that "x1" is a notational term for talking about place structures, not a lojban word or symbol of any kind. - As for the place structure of sakci (suck); when sucking through a straw the high pressure area is the beverage and the low pressure area is your mouth -- you do talk about those when talking about suck; I don't think the place structure actually implies you have to know/talk about what numeric value those pressures might have. It *might* be useful, as you suggest, to add another place for the portion of the stuff which actually gets sucked up; but I'd rather make a up a lujvo like sakcylebna (suck-take) or sakcymuvdu (suck-move) to add that place, rather than changing the gismu definitions, which are supposed to be more or less fixed by now. - Have you read the "diagrammed summary" paper? That's the document I actually started with, and I found it to be a really good introduction, especially since it covered a lot of interesting things quickly and broadly, and satisfied my curiosity about the langugage, so I could decide quickly if I wanted to study more. I would like to see something like that as the first chapter of even natlang textbooks, to give interested students a vague idea of what's coming in future lessons! ____ Chris Bogart \ / ftp://ftp.csn.net/cbogart/html/homepage.html Quetzal Consulting \/ cbogart@quetzal.com