Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 06:31:42 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712041131.GAA00995@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Robin Turner Sender: Lojban list From: Robin Turner Subject: Beginners X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1218 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Dec 4 06:31:50 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU As a beginner (and someone who doesn't have much time to study Lojban, or even read most of my e-mail) I don't actually see much of a problem with the more arcane strings - I just trash whatever I can't understand. I'm actually pleased that some people are prepared to put in so much time to clarify the more obscure points of Lojban, since some of this may well bear fruit when the next version of the textbook comes out. It's a bit like my attitude to corpus linguistics - it's not my field, and I can't be bothered with the technicalities of it, but I'm glad somebody is prepared to spend hours feeding texts into computers, because in the long run it will tell me stuff which I want to know. In the meantime I enjoy the more general strings, such as "logical gaffs" and "toxic memes", which I can both understand and contribute to. Overall, I think the list benefits from all of the following: 1. The aforementioned "scholastic" strings; 2. Real Lojban - translations and suchlike; 3. Discussions about the aims and implications of Lojban; 4. More general linguistic stuff which is relevant to Lojban. Robin Turner Bilkent Universitesi, IDMYO, Ankara, Turkey.