Message-Id: <199509130930.FAA13733@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Wed, 13 Sep 1995 01:06:35 +0100
Reply-To: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu>
From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject:      bridi conn & Nicholas tapes
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR

John:
> > [Y]ou can't do afterthought
> > bridi connectives within a NU clause. Is this true? I certainly don't
> > know how to do it, but I'd always assumed that that was because I
> > don't know how to do most things Lojban is capable of.
> It's true.  The afterthought bridi connectives are really afterthought
> >sentence< connectives, being grammatical variants of ".i", so they
> can't be used within embedded bridi.

I know this must have been debated to death long ago, but why was it
not felt that there should be a way? Surely it can't be too difficult
syntactically to have an afterthought bridi connective. I'm gobsmacked
that there is no way. After all, logically all connectives are really
bridi connectives.

Jorge:
> > While listening to the Nicholas Tapes (just got to Goran singing the
> > Lojbo-Croat anthem amidst a drunken revel),
> Can I get a copy? I'll pay for shipping and handling.

I have them only on loan, &, having myself been involved in research
projects involving recorded conversations, I know that the recordees
can sometimes be rather touchy about distribution. So I leave it to
Nick. There are about 20 hours. Without wanting to drop Nick in the
kalci, I did observe him to announce on the tapes his plan to transcribe
the lojban conversation warts and all (e.g. all glottal stops & pauses
wherever they occurred). But I do not know if he's ever transcribed
conversation before: an hour of conversation takes several days' work,
and more if one is using a normal cassette player.

It is fascinating hearing different spoken Lojban styles. Nik begins
every utterance with {i}, uses {si si si si} and then races ahead
a mile a minute while you're trying to remember what the fifth word
back was, does lujvo on the fly, and has a stumbling-conversational
fluency in Lojban roughly equivalent (but certainly not inferior)
to what I had in French after 5 hours a week for 5 years of high school
- that is, one can converse, but with great intellectual effort and
hesitation. Colin is not as fluent, but could understand Nick, which
tells you how brainy Colin must be. Ivan speaks faster than Nick, if
that is possible (but he only spoke a bit, and he may have been reading
aloud). Goran has the clearest diction (or at least his spoken Lojban
sounds like I'd imagined it would sound before I heard any). (When Nick
phoned me up when he arrived the first thing he said was {i vizykla}
and I thought he was speaking Klingon - the last syllable was [klah],
and I wasn't expecting {i}, and hands up everyone who doesn't know
the rafsi for {vi}. And I've already told you how with my English
ears I hear his voiceless stops as voiced.)

I heard no complete intonation patterns over utterances much longer
than {na gohi} - there isn't that degree of fluency yet.

It also struck me that there's a need for **echo** wh-questions, for
when one can't hear a word or doesn't know it. {kie} is too unspecific
and {ma} & co. do a different job. So, if anyone's listening, how
about a cmavo like {kau} that marks a {ma}-word as an echo question?

---
And