X-Digest-Num: 268 Message-ID: <44114.268.1456.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 13:55:43 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Subject: Re: lojban newbie: an outsider looking in X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1456 Content-Length: 14578 Lines: 318 At 10:06 PM 10/26/99 -0400, Michal Wallace (sabren) wrote: >From: "Michal Wallace (sabren)" > 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. :) No toes stepped on that I can see. Others have given you good answers to which I object only to some side issues. But I will give the "Lojban Central" answer to your questions to confirm their comments, so you know they can be believed %^) > First of all, the written materials. As far as I can tell, >www.lojban.org hasn't been updated in about a year. Answering your later question here, LLG is a VERY spare time organization, and the main leadership has not had a lot of it since the book came out (actively parenting takes a lot of time). I am not HTML savvy and am not too hot with Unix editors, and these are skills needed to manage the lojban.org Web page effectively - I am afraid of playing around and screwing things up for everybody. The material on lojban.org is primarily archival and reference material, legacy of what was only an ftp site up until a year ago. The language was baselined two years ago, and it is not going to change much, so there is not much new reference stuff to post until we get some big jobs done like the dictionary. All we can therefore do is add material to the site, and maybe weed out superfluous stuff if/when we get too much. I have a lot of material in my archives, and intend to upload it, but without knowing how to add it to our page, uploading it is not worth much. I expect to see John Cowan the first weekend in November, and we may be able to get some significant improvements in a hurry (not to mention he can give me the knowhow to confidently keep making minor improvements while a volunteer redesign continues). Some have argued for a livelier reorganization of the page, and the job has been delegated to a volunteer committee, but our volunteers have a record of disappearing for weeks and months at a time after signing up for a job, and nothing much has been done on this task. Veijo Vilva, who runs the semi-official Finland site, has an update in progress to his main page that will link to other sites. As others have noted, people have been building their own pages with new material on them, links to other pages, and a webring has been set up. All of these pages are unofficial, but so far as I know, nothing posted on them is egregiously nonstandard. Use them and add to them if you wish; Lojban will grow only if the community grows it - we can't do it here at the "center" any more. > 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? All reference material on the site in official, and except for schedules is de jure correct because it is part of the baseline. There is a draft dictionary file on the site. A little work has been done on it since it was last uploaded, but not enough of a change to warrant a new upload. No one is actively working on it - every couple of months I spend an hour or two to salve my conscience, but there is a LOT of work left to be done. The textbook was put on hold in part because the reference book that has been published is "good enough" for many people, and writing a sufficiently better book that is more textbookish requires more elementary Lojban text than currently exists. And of course I was the one working on both projects. Finally, both projects remain on low priority because even if they get finished, we cannot publish them for financial reasons. We have sold roughly 260 copies of The Complete Lojban Language, which is about half of what we need to sell in order to break even. There remains a $5K publishing loan to repay before we can consider a new book. When we next publish a book, it will probably be an intro to the language and project to replace our "level 0" package, because, while our on-line site has not changes in a year, our snail mail intro package has not been updated in 6 years. > 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. No two different Lojban tanru end up forming the same lujvo. > (a sad attempt: xu valsi drata valsi [for: "is it true that any >given word is [means something] different from any other word?] ) xu ro da poi valsi cu frica ro drata valsi le ka smuni Is it true that for each given word, it is different from all other words in meaningness? go'i Yes. > 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? Among other things. But much more. > Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? Yes but the existing book is serving as a pretty good egg, even if it isn't a true textbook. > What mechanisms are in place for collecting new lujvo? All text that is posted on this list is archived, and irregularly I go through all the posts, as well as any downloaded web material, looking for lujvo to add to the collection. Defining the lujvo that have been used is a severe bottleneck. > It seems to me that this list itself is the most up to date resource. Yes. By intent. > 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... Up until the switch to onelist, we were putting an archive on the ftp site that is now www.lojban.org. There are zipped files there that you can download and search. Veijo Vilva also has a searchable partial-archive at one point, that I presume is still available but also does not cover recent postings. At some point, someone will collect up the archives for the more recent material and add it to the Web site. >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? As noted above - the best bet is to download and search it locally using whatever tooks you have. The archive is not excessively large. > 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... Feel free, and add the stuff from the zipped archives and you can go all the way back to 1989 or whenever we started. > 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? There is a Lojban parser/glosser in Beta up on the web page, but not linked in to the site. Maybe someone can repost the URL or you can find it in the archive from last spring or summer (I am writing this offline and cannot check the address). > LogFlash: Um.. I downloaded this. I ran it. It made me cry. :) Sorry. >Looking through the archives, I managed to find references to it being >written in Pascal back in the 80's. Turbo Pascal, to be specific. > Also, that Eric Raymond tried porting it to C/C++. It didn't successfully auto-port. Got it 75% working and gave up. Debugging was too time consuming. The problems were mostly in the I/O, replacing Turbo library with curses. > I couldn't find source for either. We have not posted the source. It is several thousand lines of code, and inadequately documented. I've given copies to individuals who have volunteered to port or recode it, and no one has managed to even get as far as Eric Raymond did; the program is just too big. Nora recently unwrapped her source archive for the first time in several years and started working on the long-missing LogFlash 2 (which teaches rafsi and maybe lujvo-making), but is working much overtime until after Y2K stuff is ended, so do not expect anything soon. > 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. Nora has toyed rewriting it in Visual Basic, which she has some skill with, but it isn't a high priority, especially since I suspect VB stuff will be even less portable to Unix systems than the current code or executable. >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. Go for it. > I'm a web programmer by trade, and also have quite a >bit of experience with tutoring and accelerated learning methods. If you know that kind of stuff, then you won't want to use the existing code, which is narrowly tailored to a particular learning method (one which has worked outstandingly for everyone who has the willpower to stick with it for the month or two of an hour a day that it takes - Nora and I still have 70-80% recall of words (and would recover to 90% plus in a week or two at most) even though we almost never use the language and we used Logflash over 10 years ago. >. 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? I can put it in my queue to send you the code, but don't expect that it will help you (and I won't get it to you very quickly). It would be better to recode from the algorithm, which I think is online somewhere. > 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? Not officially. It has been often talked about. > On the LLG : I understand it's not well funded (yet), correct. > but is it a full time operation, Not hardly. Lately, other than email, it is more like a few hours a month keeping up with book orders. > or mostly run by volunteers? Entirely so. >What does it actually _do_ on a day to day basis? Manage this list. Fill book orders. Try to get the snail mail list updated so we can finally send out something to those not on this list announcing the book that was published 2 years ago. Everything else is either farmed out to volunteers or on a vary back burner, so: coordinate where possible when volunteers are actually getting something done. > 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.] We have not lost money. We have over 1000 copies left and they will eventually sell - sales have trickled along at a steady and even slowly increasing rate, but all we have is word of mouth since our only advertising is on the net, and we refuse to spam. When I send out a snail mail announcement, we may get enough sales in a short time to bring us up to break even, since the snail list has over 1000 addresses of people who asked to be kept informed. But there are several hundred addresses to be typed in and checked. There will be a CD ROM version of the lojban.org archive, rather more up front than other things on the back burner, because frankly it will be a file dump with nothing fancy added, and hence easy to do and relatively cheap to publish. > Finally: is the flag/logo really working? What does that mean? It is a logo, and people recognize it. > 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 logo was chosen by vote of subscribers to our snail mail journal among all proposals submitted several years ago. It took roughly 5 years after the contest before we even had bit map drawing, so we have never made much use of it, other than as icons for a Windows, and finally on the Lojban reference book. > 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. Not likely, since it is a total non-priority and would render its use on the book obsolete and confusing. > Is there a specific meaning to the arrows and interlocked >circles? Venn diagram (for logic) with superimposed coordinate axes, arrows pointing outward to suggest infinite expansion (which has several positive relevances to the language and the project %^) lojbab ---- lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ " Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.