X-Digest-Num: 267 Message-ID: <44114.267.1446.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 22:06:03 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michal Wallace (sabren)" Subject: lojban newbie: an outsider looking in X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1446 Content-Length: 5441 Lines: 106 .ui coi rodo I'm fairly new to lojban, curious, and confused. Over the past few days I've been reading the lojban website and the archives for this list, trying to decide whether or not to learn lojban. I decided I want to... and so, I have a whole bunch of questions! Some of these are kind of critical, so forgive me if I step on some toes. :) First of all, the written materials. As far as I can tell, www.lojban.org hasn't been updated in about a year. Should I trust it? I mean, the textbook is on hold until the dictionary comes out.. But the dictionary is expected in late 1997! Was the dictionary ever finished? If not, who's working on it? My understanding is that while there are many root words (gismu) in lojban, they don't account for every noun/verb/whatever you could say in a natural language. So most things are described metaphorically (tanru) by combining gismu. If the tanru catches on, it gets cooked down into a compound word (lujvo). There is some kind of magical trick to this process that ensures that no two lojban words are ever the same. (a sad attempt: xu valsi drata valsi [for: "is it true that any given word is [means something] different from any other word?] ) Other than that lojban sentence, am I right so far? And if so, is the textbook simply waiting on an expanded list of lujvo so people don't have to talk in tanru as much? Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? What mechanisms are in place for collecting new lujvo? It seems to me that this list itself is the most up to date resource. One problem I've had is that it's hard to search. Onelist will only let me search digests, egroups just has a terrible search engine... I haven't reached the point of wanting to do this yet, but I would suspect that words with periods and apostrophes won't be indexed correctly, so searching the lojban texts in these two archives would be especially difficult. Is there any other searchable archive? I'm considering creating a 'bot to get the entire archive from egroups, saving it to my site, setting up my own little search engine, and putting it all on my website... What work has been done in mechanically translating lojban into english? I found one article on the .org site, and of course the glossary generator. But does anyone actually have code to suck up lojban and spit out English? LogFlash: Um.. I downloaded this. I ran it. It made me cry. :) Looking through the archives, I managed to find references to it being written in Pascal back in the 80's. Also, that Eric Raymond tried porting it to C/C++. I couldn't find source for either. Basically, I think this software was probably great back in the 80's, but it obviously came out long before the dawn of the modern user interface. Simply porting it to C really doesn't make much sense to me - but making a web based version in flash, or a high level scripting language does. I'm a web programmer by trade, and also have quite a bit of experience with tutoring and accelerated learning methods.. I'd be more than happy to lead a project to revamp the software. Would anybody else be interested in this? Where could I get the legacy code? Also on the topic of software, I saw references to a GUI lojban word processor. This reminds me very much of some work being done with the python scripting language.. There's an editor written in python for writing python, and it does stuff like syntax highlighting and what have you... Python in general is a really quick language to pick up, and can be compiled to run on a Java virtual machine, and could be easily tied in with the Java speech libraries. It might be a good place to start.. I'm a big supporter of the emacs idea, too. Has anyone done anything with these? On the LLG : I understand it's not well funded (yet), but is it a full time operation, or mostly run by volunteers? What does it actually _do_ on a day to day basis? I get the feeling that one thing it _doesn't_ do is advocacy. I realize Lojban isn't really out to take over the world, but surely, the more people that speak it, the more valuable it will be. Is anyone doing anything about spreading the word? (Outside of conlang and auxlang circles, I mean).. "Advocacy" might involve informing teachers of alternative schools, organizing classes, keeping the website(s) up to date, and coming up with more user-friendly learning materials, books, CD roms, a phrasebook, etc, published under some kind of open license so that the materials could be freely modified, copied, and sold. [From my understanding, the LLG lost quite a bit of money on the reference grammar. Perhaps that was avoidable.] Finally: is the flag/logo really working? I hunted it down to put on the lojban website that I'm making... And decided against it. No offense to whoever created it, but it's not a very powerful logo. The lines and circles look kind of weak. Sickly, even. I haven't seen anyone actually using it, so I kind of wonder if it ought to be replaced. Is there a specific meaning to the arrows and interlocked circles? I guess that's about it. Like I said, sorry if I stepped on any toes. The newbie throws himself on the mercy of the list. :) co'o mi'e maikl ------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.manifestation.com/ http://www.linkwatcher.com/metalog/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------