From lojbab@lojban.org Thu Jan 27 10:43:02 2000 X-Digest-Num: 346 Message-ID: <44114.346.1861.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:43:02 -0500 From: Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group Subject: Draft update of Lojban FAQ X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1861 Following is the non-HTML text of my revision to the Lojban-List FAQ, now titled the Lojban FAQ. Please send comments. lojbab =================== Lojban FAQ updated January 19, 2000 Most bold faced words are defined under Question 4. ============================== TECHNICAL 1a. Why do some texts use instead of <'>? 1b. Could I take a text with s and do a search & replace with <'> and endup with "standard" Lojban? 1c. Why is one better than the other? 2. How do you borrow words from other languages? 3. Isn't it confusing that some rafsi are identical to cmavo? 4. What are those Lojban word that you are using even in English text? What's all the other jargon and acronyms you use? =============================== RESOURCES 5. What's the best way to start learning Lojban? 6. How can I look up gismu, lujvo, and cmavo when I am translating from lojban? 7. Sources of text to read? 8. What messages are appropriate for the Lojban List? 9. What are the abbreviations used on the list's subject lines? 10. Are there archives? WWW site? ftp site? 11. What's available in languages other than English? 12. What software's available? =============================== GENERAL 13. Who is everybody? Who's in charge? 14. How many people are there in the Lojban community? How many can use Lojban, and how well? 15. What is LogFest? =============================== PROJECT STATUS 16. What parts of the language are well worked out, and which parts are in flux? 17. What are the most current revisions of each part of the language descriptions? 18. What projects are being worked on? When will they be done? 19. What can I do to help? ============================= HISTORICAL 20. How was the default place structure order of sumti in a selbri determined? (There does not appear to be any rhyme or reason for the order of sumti in many gismu. ) 21. How did the gismu get made: discussion, etymology examples 22. What's the difference between Loglan and Lojban? How is Loglan-82 related? (it's not!) 23. Why does it have a special meaning when the selbri comes first in a sentence? 24. Why are there so many words for AND? Why not just let {.e} connect two sumti, bridi, bridi-tails, or anything else? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ TECHNICAL 1a. Why do some texts use instead of <'>? Aesthetic reasons. And Rosta in particular thinks mohi looks better in print than mo'i and sometimes uses it the hopes that he can influence the Lojban community to accept this other spelling convention. This is purely a difference in spelling; they are pronounced the same, and should be considered different ways of writing the same "letter". This alternate spelling also is somewhat closer to the spelling of TLI Loglan. There is another similar spelling convention, which has never been used, designed to make Lojban look more familiar to potential converts from TLI. This alternate convention may be found in the Lojban Reference Grammar 1b. Could I take a text with s and do a search and replace with <'> and end up with "standard" lojban? Probably not, because people like And have used a number of non-standard spelling conventions: <'> is omitted altogether where the vowels couldn't possibly be stuck together; for example, he'd write coe for co'e, since is not a legal combination. He has used <.> as in English, to end a sentence, rather than as a pause. He has capitalized the first word of the sentence. 1c. Why is one better than the other? The standard usage is better because each letter corresponds to one sound and each sound corresponds to one letter. And's usage is better because <. >and <'> are ugly in the middle of words, and sentences ought to start with a capital letter to better conform to Roman alphabet spelling conventions. 2. How do you borrow words from other languages? There are four ways to borrow words. Only the most common method is covered here; see the Lojban Reference Grammar for more detail. Borrowed words are called fu'ivla, meaning approximately "copied words" (after all, "borrowing" implies we're going to give them back someday!) The use of tanru or lujvo is not always appropriate for very concrete or specific terms (e. g. 'brie', or 'cobra'), or for jargon words specialized to a narrow field (e. g. 'quark', 'integral', or 'iambic pentameter'). These words are in effect 'names' for concepts, and the names were invented by speakers of another language. The vast majority of names for plants, animals, foods, and scientific terminology cannot be easily expressed as tanru. They thus must be 'borrowed' (actually 'taken') into Lojban from the original language, forming words called fu'ivla. The word must be Lojbanized into one of several permitted fu'ivla forms. A rafsi is then attached to the beginning of the Lojbanized form, usually using a vocalic consonant as 'glue' to ensure that the resulting word doesn't fall apart. The rafsi categorizes or limits the meaning of the fu'ivla; otherwise a word having several different jargon meanings in other languages (such as 'integral'), would require a choice made as to which meaning should be assigned to the fu'ivla. fu'ivla, like other brivla, are not permitted to have more than one definition. Summarizing the most common method to make fu'ivla: Lojbanize the word to be 'borrowed' by the methods used for cmene. Convert all y's to some other vowel or to a vocalic consonant. Modify the ending to be a vowel, either by dropping a final consonant or by adding an extra vowel. Modify the beginning to be a consonant, either by adding a extra consonant or dropping an initial vowel. Choose a gismu (not a rafsi) that categorizes the fu'ivla into a "topic area". Replace the final vowel of the gismu with a vocalic 'r'. Prefix the modified gismu to produce the final fu'ivla. Examples: spaghetti -> cidjrspageti or djarspageti maple tree -> tricrmeipli maple sugar -> saktrmeipli mathematical integral -> cmacrnintegra or cmacrntegra brie -> cirlrbri cobra -> sincrkobra quark -> saskrkuarka iambic -> pemcrniambo A fu'ivla thus consists of three parts: the classifier - the glue - the borrowed part The quintessential example is djarspageti, meaning "spaghetti". dja is the classifier: it's the short form rafsi for cidja, meaning "food". {r} is the glue: it's necessary to keep the word from falling into two parts. spageti is the Lojbanized version of "spaghetti". The classifier is glued on the front for two reasons: it helps identify strange borrowings, and it prevents borrowings that happen to coincide with things that are already Lojban words. For example if you borrowed the word "spageti" directly, it could lead to ambiguity in a phrase like *ko bevri re spageti palta which could mean "Bring two plates of spaghetti" or something like "Be a carrying reptile and a plate made of this" *ko bevri respa ge ti palta. In a natural language there would be no doubt which of the two was meant, but Lojban is constructed so that you shouldn't need to understand the sentence to know where one word ends and the next begins. 3. Isn't it confusing that some rafsi are identical to cmavo? No, it isn't. In theory you can tell completely from the neighboring syllables whether something is a cmavo or a rafsi. This is how the computer is able to parse Lojban without understanding its meaning. For example the dei in bavlamdei ("tomorrow") is a rafsi for "day", not the cmavo dei, a special pronoun meaning "this sentence". We know which is which because Lojban words can't end in a consonant, so dei must be a part of bavlamdei; bavlam can't be a whole word. (No, it can't be a name, either. Names end with a consonant followed by a pause, written as a ".") In practice you can also use your knowledge of the meanings of the words to help with this; it's possible to think up a sentence like la .bavlam. dei cusku, "Bavlam says this sentence.", but it's not likely in practice if you don't know anyone named "Bavlam"! 4. What are those lojban words that you are using even in English text? What's all the other jargon and acronyms you use? Here are APPROXIMATE definitions. Words in ALL CAPS on the Lojban list often refer to Lojban parts of speech. When this convention is used, the capitalization of {'} is {h}, so the capitalization of la'e would be {LAhE} attitudinal - A Lojban interjection (Wow! Eeek!) audiovisual isomorphism - Spoken and written Lojban should be the same BAI - Lojban prepositions/adverbs bridi - Lojban sentence - a "predicate" brivla - any word that can state a relationship among several objects or concepts, and thus be the core word in a Lojban bridi - a "predicate word" cmavo - a "little word" showing structure rather than carrying meaning cmene - Lojban names evidential - special word indicating how the speaker got their information fu'ivla - borrowed word gadri - Lojban article or determiner - signals the start of a sumti gismu - basic 5-letter lojban root word; more information JCB - James Cooke Brown, the inventor of Loglan JL - ju'i lobypli ju'i lobypli - a Lojban newsletter/journal. Publication is currently suspended, but we are hoping to resume publication in the near future. le lojbo karni - a Lojban newsletter intended to keep our lowest level of supporters informed as to what is going on (in hopes of inspiring greater activity). le'avla - the old word for fu'ivla LK - le lojbo karni lujvo - compound word pe'i - in my opinion place structure - the specified canonical order of sumti in a Lojban bridi, so that you know who is doing what to whom. rafsi - building block(s) of lujvo compound words selbri - the part of a Lojban sentence that expresses the relationship between the various objects (sumti) selma'o - part of speech slinku'i - a hypothetical borrowed word, which would not be legal because it could be interpred as parts of other words in some contexts. sumti - an object or idea which may be related to others, that relationship being expressed in a Lojban bridi tanru - a phrase formed of two or more Lojban brivla TLI - The Loglan Institute =============================== RESOURCES 5. What's the best way to start learning Lojban? We recommend Work through the Lojban mini-lesson and/or Robin Turner's mini-course (better but incomplete; 7 lessons so far). Work through the Diagrammed Summary. The mini-lesson and diagrammed summary were merged and abridged into Chapter 2 of the Reference Grammar. Read through the Reference Grammar -- reading for concepts, not detail. Create a cheat sheet with lists of gismu and cmavo you're likely to need. Read and write Lojban text using the Reference Grammar and your cheat sheets for reference. Post your text to Lojban List for feedback. If you get serious about it, use Logflash to bone up on your vocabulary. If some concepts in any of the above resources seem unclear, the Draft Textbook lessons may help. Or post your questions to Lojban List. A source of further resources for learning Lojban is Evgueni Sklyanin's Lojban Links page. 6. How can I look up gismu, lujvo, and cmavo when I am translating from Lojban? Use one of these: - print yourself out the gismu, lujvo, and cmavo word lists as well as the rafsi list - Keep the dictionary online and use a text editor with searching capability to find stuff in it. In UNIX, make an alias with the "grep" command. 7. Sources of text to read? The Lojban file server has texts, some annotated and translated. The Lojban List will have discussion in Lojban from time to time. Subscribe at www.onelist.com, keyword lojban Old issues of ju'i lobypli usually have several examples of commented text, though early issues may have some obsolete words or usages. Other Lojbanists publish Web pages, some with Lojban texts and some entirely in Lojban. Here are some interesting sites. Stuff on paper can be ordered from the Logical Language Group; however at this time Lojbab is concentrating on other things and it's much better if you can retrieve stuff off the net. 8. What messages are appropriate for the Lojban List? Beginners are very encouraged to post. Anything's appropriate as long as the title approximately reflects the content, and you're not selling magazine subscriptions or mail-order brides (exception: it's OK if it's in Lojban!) You can post on any subject in Lojban, or about Lojban in any language. You can post in any language you think people will understand. Postings in Lojban warm the cockles of Lojbab's heart. 9. What are the abbreviations used on the list's subject lines? A few different people are using different conventions for this purpose, usually only when list traffic is heavy. You may see: TECH: technical discussion TEXT: lojban text JBO: or T: lojban text GEN: or G: grammar discussion PLI: or U: usage discussion LOJ: or L: logic discussion CLI: or B: beginner discussion RET: or Q: question to the experienced (not restricted to beginners) LIN: or W: whispers CPE: or R: request for translation SNU: or C: chat (bau la lojban. ju'o) VRC: or D: general discussion (anything that won't fit) TRO: or A: list administration and miscellanea 10. Are there archives? WWW site? ftp site? Web site: http://www.lojban.org European Web site: http://animal.helsinki.fi/lojban/lojban.html 11. What's available in languages other than English? There are brochures in Spanish, French, Esperanto, and Russian. Jorge and Jose have translated the gismu list into Spanish. 12. What software's available? Lojban Parser - the definitive standard of Lojban grammar, verifies the grammaticality of text Lojban Parser/Glosser (includes the parser, roughly glosses text to English) Logflash 1 - teaches gismu; Turbo-Pascal source (not well-documented) here Logflash 3 - teaches cmavo Prolog Semantic Analyzer Random Sentence Generator - updated version in progress, the available version has somewhat obsolete grammar definitions Lujvo-maker program =============================== GENERAL 13. Who is everybody? Who's in charge? [Wanna be on this list? Write a paragraph in Lojban about yourself and I'll include it.] Scott Brickner - sjb@universe.digex.net coi mi'e skat. .i mi se cnino la lojban. gi'e troci .o'nai lo penydjuxa'a .i mi nanca li cire gi'e speni .i mi se jibri le sampla di'o la ibubymym. sedi'o la ostyn. teksas. seka'i la merlyn. grup. .i mi ctuca mi fo la lojban. lenu samci'etcidu .i.o'acu'i mi xamgu birjyzbasu .i mi ca birjyzbasu lo ke kerfu bo grute bo vrusi ke'e ke galtu bo fusra birje .i mi sutra je zmadu tcidu .ije le cumymu'efi'a ralju James Cooke Brown - The inventor of Loglan - not associated with Lojban now John Clifford aka pc - pycyn@aol.com - A logician, specializing in tense logic, who's been involved with the project since the 1970s John Cowan - cowan@CCIL.ORG - Reference Grammar author Jose Ramon Gallo Vazquez - gallo%galileo.fie@CS.US.ES coi mi'e. xoses. .i mi spano .i mi xabju la sevi,ias. ne le sangu'e .i mi ca nanca lireci .i mi se ctuca fo lo samske di'o le diklo ckule ni'o mi nelci le bangu .e le kulnu .e le lijda vu'o poi su'anai tcesau gi'a stuna gi'a cizra .iji'a mi nelci le nu tcidu loi cukta gi'e ciska .i mi tcenei tu'a la stanislav. lem. joi la tolki,en. joi la borxes. joi la robrt. greivz. joi so'i lo drata .i mi nelci lo drata noi nuncusku nandu mi bau la lojban. .i mi tcenei la lojban. ni'o be'ucu'i .i .a'o di'u na malspano vau zo'o .i co'o mi'e. xoses. lojbab aka Bob LeChevalier - lojbab@lojban.org - President of the Logical Language Group. Cyril Slobin - slobin@ice.ru mi'e kir. .i lu ki,RIL. ar,KAD,ie,vitc. ZLO,bin. li'u mulno cmene mi .i mi jbena fi li pabi pi'e so pi'e pasoxaze .i mi rusko .i mi xabju la moskvas. .i mi skami certu .i la xelen. speni mi .i la serges. bersa mi .i la dinax. me le mi mlatu .i zo'o lo lojbo cmene cu cizra mi .i mi na ca kakne lenu zmadu cusku .i ri'a bo la lojban. ca fange mi .i ku'i mi pacna lenu ri ba slabu mi Goran Topic - amadan@ibm.net mi'e goran. .i mi caki nanca lirepapisu'o .i le kerfa . e le kanla vu'o po'e mi manbu'e .i mi mitre lipazeji'imu gi'e ki'ogra lixaji'imu ni'o mi ba'o . uu mlicre lo xumske gi'e ku'i certu lo samske gi'ebo tadni lo banske .i mi pu tadni ca'o lo nanca remei lo cmacyske .iku'i mi steba gi'esemu'ibo sisti ca lenu mi co'a jimpe ledu'u mi selzdi lenu cilre le vrici bangu noi so'ecu'o tcefange gi'ebazibo co'a tadni lo banske ni'o mi pu jivna fi lenu dansu loi spano joi xispo joi merko gi'e pu remoi loi za'e remei pe le mi gugde .i ku'i le mi dansu kansa co'a kansa na'ebo mi .ije mi steba dukse fi'o fanta lenu mi ctuca lo drata ni'oji'a mi tcenei lo xarfi'a gi'e cmima lo diklo xarfi'agri .i mi nunxeldraco kelci .i mi kelci lo selcpa karda po'u la djixad. .i mi kelci loi drata ji'a karda ni'osu'a mi te jinvi ledu'u cizra .ije la'edi'u pluka mi ni'o pe'i dei banzu vau pei co'o mi'e. goran. 14. How many people are there in the Lojban community? How many can use Lojban, and how well? There are about 1500 people on the hard-copy mailing list, most of whom have a rather low-level interest: they get the hard-copy newsletter le lojbo karni. Around 130 have paid subscriptions to ju'i lobypli, the more technical journal. As of January 2000, around 275 people have purchased the Lojban Reference Grammar, but there are large numbers on our mailing list who have yet to be notified of its publication (a long story). Aso, as of that date, there are about 180 people on Lojban List, with the number rising slowly (about 30% of Lojban List subscribers are from outside the US, and their ages appear to average under 30). Over 100 people have posted text in Lojban; a couple dozen have demonstarted ability to converse in Lojban in real time, and one person, Nick Nicholas, is considered to be completely fluent in Lojban. (Nick developed his fluency solely through self-study and translation work - he was able to converse at near-fluent speed the very first time he spoke to anyone else in Lojban). 15. What is LogFest? LogFest is the annual gathering of the Logical Language Group. We are required by law to have an annual meeting, and have used that excuse to hold a "convention", "party", "social event" for any and all in the community who are willing to come. LogFest is held at lojbab's house in Fairfax VA, a suburb of Washington DC, usually over a weekend in July or August. We have typically had around 20 people come for part or all of the weekend, and these are usually among the more committed Lojbanists (though around half the attendees typically are at beginner skill levels). Usually several people travel a substantial distance in order to attend, and those people are often treated thereby as a guest of honor of sorts, being a little more "equal" than the others in choosing what activities we focus on. Chris Bogart came from Colorado one summer, and was very intent on Lojban conversation, so we tried much more of this in that last LogFest than at any previous gathering. Other than this focus, LogFest is largely unstructured, in part because we don't know who or how many are coming until a couple of days before things start As such, some have criticized Logfest for being ill-planned, but it is what the community chooses to make it. Because of the "officialness" of the gathering, and the fact that we actually do have a "meeting" when people vote to set policy for the group, some of the more major decisions affecting the Lojban community tend to get made at or as a result of the meeting. It is at those meeting where the LLG leadership feels most accountable to the whole community, because some people come who are not actively part of the Lojban List net community, and they usually have a different perspective on priorities than those who have the chance to inundate themselves in Lojban daily on this list. (We also note that some of our more substantial financial contributors are not active on Lojban list, and we are somewhat beholden to them, especially on issues that result in income or expenditure). =============================== PROJECT STATUS 16. What parts of the language are well worked out, and which parts are in flux? As of 1997, the language design has been baselined for a minimum of 5 years after the puboication of the three books: the reference grammar, the dictionary, and the textbook. Since the latter two are not near publication, this means that no changes to the language will even be considered until at least 2006. This baseline is non-negotiable, even if we enter into discussions with The Loglan Institute to reunite the Loglan community after JCB's retirement. The phonology, orthography, and morphology have been essentially stable since 1988, except for a slight change in what counts as a legal fu'ivla. The gismu list has been stable since 1988, except that about 25 gismu have been added and 2 gismu changed. This includes the words themselves and the English keywords; place structures for the gismu had minor changes up until 1994, but since then only clarifications of confusing wording have been made to the official baseline gismu list, and they are now considered baselined. The rafsi have been unchanged since 1993, when around 20% were changed in a final tuning before baselining them. Much existing text was not been updated after the rafsi change, so texts dated before 1993 may be confusing. The grammar has been basically stable since 1993, was under careful documented control after that date, and frozen with the publication of the Reference Grammar in 1997. The cmavo list has been baselined since 1997, though new compounds may be defined through usage. The only area not frozen is the addition of new words to the lexicon through borrowing (fu'ivla) or compounding (lujvo). Those two productive areas are open-ended; a primary limitation on the language definition is the inability to record and define new coinings as fast as they are invented. The basic semantics of the language are stable. There are still ongoing disputes about "how to say it best in Lojban"; we expect these to continue indefinitely. As a matter of policy, changes even to Lojban non-baselined usages, if they would require people to re-learn things, are resisted vigorously. Almost anything that practical people (i.e. beginners) would actually use is well worked out, debugged and stable. Points of controversy include highly technical philosophical issues such as whether empty sets are or are not excluded as the candidate referent set of a sumti, or whether current grammar is adequate to represent all possible forms of indirect questions. The answers are very important (no joke), but people have been speaking natural languages for years without knowing the answers, so don't worry about Lojban. And you don't have to know what lambda calculus is. The major point of controversy that is significant to beginners is a feeling in some quarters that the policies used to design the place (argument, sumti) structures of gismu (basic predicate words) were not exactly optimal. Sometimes the semantics of the less-used places are at issue. Officially, we'll go with what we have to preserve the investment people have made in learning the language, and after the baseline period is over, those who are actually speaking the language will be allowed to discuss changes in Lojban. There are no plans to ever seriously discuss changes to the language other than in Lojban. 17. What are the most current revisions of each part of the language descriptions? The versions found on the Lojban File Archive are definitive, except that the printed version of the Reference Grammar takes precedence over the HTML version. Working drafts of books in preparation are maintained on lojbab's home computers, and may be slightly updated from the on-line versions. 18. What projects are being worked on? When will they be done? The Reference Grammar is of course complete and published. Dictionary - The draft Lojban dictionary is online, compiled primarily by lojbab. It needs to have lujvo and cmavo added to it. Volunteers are welcome at all levels of expertise for lujvo definition work; there are thousands of words to be defined with more created all the time. Nora LeChevalier serves as lead on the lujvo definition project. The set of working files for additions to the dictionary, as of January 2000, may be found here. Introduction - John Cowan is leading the effort to produce a new set of introductory materials that can be published as a cheap book, much less expensive than our current printed introductory material. Web site - Veijo Vilva maintains the Helsinki web site. lojbab maintains the Lojban File Archive and associated web site. xod maintains the Lojban Web ring, which has sites created by several other Lojbanists. Evgueni Sklyanin maintains a set of links to Lojban Web pages created by several others in the Lojban community; copies of this page of links will be kept on the Lojban File Archive and the Helsinki site because of occasional connectivity problems to the home site in Russia. FAQ - lojbab now maintains this FAQ, but wants to delegate the job. Textbook - a draft of the textbook is available online, but it is out of date and incomplete. No one is working on it right now; it's considered fairly low priority until the dictionary is done. The main limitation in the existing draft is that a lot of beginner texts are needed which are both interesting and without use of esoteric features of the language. People tend to move beyond the beginner stage very rapidly once they start trying to use the language non-trivially, and gew therefore end up able to confine themselves to the most basic features of the language. JL and LK - these will resume publication as soon as the LLG address data base is brought up to date, hopefully sometime during the year 2000. Changes and additions were recorded on paper for around 6 years without being entered onto the computer, and we are obliged to account to people for their money balances. This process will start with the completion of the Web page update. Random Sentence Generator - this is being updated to be consistent with the baselined grammar. The existing program on this site dates back to grammar 2.08, about 8 years old. The update is low priority. LogFlash 2 - Nora LeChevalier is working on a version of LogFlash for learning rafsi and lujvo-making. The prior version became unmaintainably obsolete in 1989. LogFlash Language Learning research - lojbab gathers data from all Lojbanists willing to use LogFlash on a systematic basis for a few months. This data will help prove or disprove the meaningfulness of the recognition scores used to create Lojban gismu, and may lead to publishable general research in the field of 2nd language learning. Contact lojbab if interested. Lojban Adventure - Nick Nicholas translated the text portion of the classic Colossal Cave text adventure game into Lojban several years ago. At the time there were plans to update an old Adventure program to support thie new text, but the current state of adventure game design suggests that someone use the game engine called Inform (which has a specific manual for writing adventure games in translation). See the rec.arts.interactive-fiction FAQ, http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq/ and the interactive. Eaton Interface - Helen Eaton's 1930s era list of the most frequently used concepts in 4 European languages has long been a benchmark for completeness of the Lojban lexicon. Volunteers are welcome to translate 1 or more pages of words from this list to Lojban. The file eaton.zip contains word lists by page and proposed TLI Loglan words for each concept (the tanru metaphors for the proposed TLI words are often very poor, but could spark ideas). Chrestomathy - This is a collection of translated and original writings designed to show a wide sampling of a language. We will want to produce one of these for Lojban after the core language description books are written. We need translations of texts generally a bit longer than the typical effort (1000-10000 words), and as wide a variety of texts and styles, from as many different source languages as possible. TLI Loglan Interface - If there is ever to be a reunification of the two Loglan language communities, the first step will necessarily be a translation interface mapping words and grammar from TLI Loglan to Lojban (the other direction may also be desirable, but would be more difficult, and we intend to coalesce the community around the Lojban baseline in any event). The first step in this, a mapping of gismu and cmavo, has been done, although there has been no accounting for place structures of the TLI Loglan gismu, and the work may be slightly outdated. See oldlog.txt for the work that has been done. WHEN? Projects are all being done by volunteers, and therefore will be done when people finish them. We've promised dates in the past and invariably been wrong. The priorities are for the dictionary and the introductory materials book, with the latter more likely to come out earlier than the former. Publication of books is severely hampered by finances (anyone with money is welcome to donate!), and the lack of ability to publish in the short term has tended to hurt motivation and productivity of those working on those publications. A News page will contain updates to this list of projects, updated every 1-2 months. 19. What can I do to help? A few possibilities: Write in Lojban on the list Post beginner questions on Lojban List and don't be intimidated Tell about yourself and your interests (in Lojban preferably, but English is OK) on Lojban List Write something in Lojban (Try to write something new - translation of literature is not generally a good or easy beginner exercise). Study Lojban vocabulary using LogFlash or flashcards Come to LogFest in July/August in Fairfax VA (near Washington, DC), USA. Try expressing yourself in Lojban Invite others to join a live IRC chat in or about Lojban Send money to LLG Keep a diary in Lojban ============================= HISTORICAL 20. How was the default place structure order of sumti in a selbri determined? (There does not appear to be any rhyme or reason for the order of sumti in many gismu. ) They went through a lot of revisions; it's something in between planning and evolution. There is a considerable amount of system there, but it is ill-documented. The nice thing to know is that you don't have to memorize the place structures. Just using the language, you will come to have a feel for which places are present, and in what order. 21. How did the gismu get made: discussion, etymology examples? The full set of etymologies is on the File Server . There isn't a lot of explanation, but the etymogies in 6 languages and the scoring for each language are given, in order Chinese/English/Hindi/Spanish/Russian/Arabic - a 0 score means that the language made no contribution to the word, and thus its etymological keyword did not matter. The languages were weighted. While new gismu are not being made, lojbab updates the weighting based on estimated numbers of first and second language speakers every couple of years. The original and 1999 weights may be found here. 22. What's the difference between Loglan and Lojban? How is Loglan-82 related? (it's not!) James Cooke Brown (JCB) came up with the idea of Loglan in the 1940s, and starting inventing the language around 1955. It's been evolving ever since. In 1982-4 or so there was a political disagreement and the Loglan community fell apart. A couple of years later, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab), then working with JCB, attempted to resurrect the community. This led to a falling out based on JCB's proprietary intellectual property claims on the language. The community split into two efforts, with JCB at the head of of the rump effort, The Loglan Institute (TLI), and (lojbab) at the head of the other, the Logical Language Group (LLG). The latter is Lojban, which LLG (backed up by a court decision) considers a subcategory of Loglan. JCB has recently retired as leader of TLI - he is 79 years old, and it is unclear if the rump organization has leadership capable of sustaining the effort. A more lengthy discussion of the issues can be found here, and in older issues of ju'i lobypli lojbab makes occasional efforts to spark discussion that would lead to reunification of the efforts behind Lojban (no consideration will be given to abandoning the Lojban baseline). Loglan-82 is a completely unrelated computer language developed in Poland by people unaware of the existence of the Loglan/Lojban project. 23. Why does it have a special meaning when the selbri comes first? In Loglan it used to be a command, but now we use either ko or attitudinals. In a poi broda phrase it's likely that you'll want x1 to be ke'a and to explicitly state x2. If V-initial weren't special, and if syntax within a poi clause were consistent with sentence-level syntax, then you'd have toexplicitly use fe or zo'e or ke'a to get to the x2. For example, now we say le nanmu poi prami mi and the x1 of prami is elided,and we can assume it's ke'a, which here equals le nanmu. Without this special treatment of V-initial, we'd have to say le nanmu poi prami ke'a mi or le nanmu poi ke'a prami mi or le nanmu poi ke'a mi prami. So: it saves 2 syllables in what's arguably the most common way of using poi. May or may not be worth it, depending on how you value word order flexibility vs. brevity. In general it lets you easily get to x2 in sentences without an x1. 24. Why are there so many words for AND? Why not just let {.e} connect two sumti, bridi, bridi-tails, or anything else? We use different connectives for different scopes. Doing so helps the listener keep track of what exactly the speaker wants connected. This is much more important in speech than in text, because in text you can reread and ponder. If you have a multi-part nested sumti joined to another multi-part nested sumti, having clear indicators of scope may make the sentence understandable when otherwise it is not. It is therefore hoped that spoken Lojban and written Lojban can be similar in level of complexity. (You know, audiovisual isomorphism). ---- 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.