Message-Id: <m0t6aym-0000ZOC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Sat, 21 Oct 1995 06:14:42 -0400
Reply-To:     Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: purple lojban
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 3448
Lines: 58

And wrote:
>ever-edudite John Cojban:
>> la lojbab. cusku di'e
>> > Poet and semi-Lojbanist Michael Helsem created the word zirjbo
>
>Why "semi-Lojbanist"? I believe he's the author of the only published
>book written in Lojban.

Because almost nothing that he wrote would pass for even very bad Lojban.
Michael is a poet who believes in poetic license, and he took many many
liberties with the grammar and vocabulary, often very malglico ones
(or perhaps malylatmo).  I'm not so much of a purist tos ay that this is
necessarily "wrong" - poets write ungrammatical but very good poetry
all the time.  But it is clear that poets who do so in their native language
do so with full knowledge of what they do.  Michael tried to write very
sophisticated Lojban text and poetry without really learning the language -
just kind of string the words together based onm their semantics so that they
sounded good, as best I can tell (Nick thinks Helsem's work is actually
better quality than this, but I can only tell it as I read it - and I cannot
make much out of Helsem's stuff - it doesn't scan for me.)  Even worse than
Helsem's poetry were his letters, alas.  They were by far the longest pieces
of "Lojban" that had been written at the time he wrote them - 2-4 pages of
fairly fine print.  I still have them all, but no one except him has ever
 managed to make it through more than around one page, and that takes hours of
puzzling.  I finally had to ask him to always send a translation with his
texts, and thereafter stopped trying to read anything he wrote in Lojban.

MY understanding is that this is not just his practice in Lojban; he apparently
has written poetry in MANY different conlangs.  It just is not clear whether
he has ever learned any well enough to meet the first test of language - that
it communicate.

I am being of course qquite harsh here.  I was immensely impressed by his first
effort at writing to me, and did indeed striuggle through that page until I had
a general gist of what he was trying for, and gave him detailed feedback
on it.  I hope I do just as well by any other newcomers to the language that
have the initiative to write longer texts, and that others do so as well
when I (as is usual) don't have time.  I WANT people to try to learn the
language.  My harshness with Helsem comes primarily because in the
year or two when he actively wrote Lojban (I was getting letters and poetry
monthly or more often at times), he showed very little improvement in
understanding of some very basic things about the language - things almost
every other newcomer seems to pick up within one or two attempts to write.
This cause me, and obviously Cowan by his words, to label Helsem as someone
who was interested in the language, but not really interested in *learning*
the language.

Michael is still out there, but is somewhat of a computerphobe, and is not
as far as I know, on the net.  I still recommend that prospective Lojbanists
in Dallas look him up, because I think he MIGHT be able to learn the
language if working actively with someone who could show their non-understanding
of his errors in near real-time.  Every several months, I get a postcard
showing me that he still wants us to know he is alive, but as of yet, I don't
think that anyone who has taken a copy of his "Purple Lojban
poetry book" has ever written to him with feedback on it, and thus I think
he finally tired of writing to a black hole.

lojbab