[lojban-beginners] Re: go'i / ri

["Brett Williams" <mungojelly@gmail.com>]

On 8/14/08, Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:

  That was really a very nice explanation.  Maybe you should write the
next iteration of the beginner lessons....

ki'e do

I'm working on writing beginner lessons.  The first step, much more important than the lessons, is deciding what to teach.  I've been thinking about it for a long time.  Lately I've been thinking of teaching a subset of the gismu which are not necessarily universally the most useful, but which are easy to learn and good for telling simple stories.  Animals, plants, simple objects, etc.
 

 
     This might not have been the best example, but I talk like that
all the time in English, and wish I could do so in lojban (see?  I did
it again, without even intending to.  And again!)

I dunno, it might be possible to make Lojban do what you described somehow, but I never had much luck learning to speak Lojban when I was trying to shape it anything like my English.  (God, look at that last English sentence I wrote, transforming that gunk into Lojban would be torture!)   For instance, any application of "cei broda" in text in an English-like style seems impossibly unnatural.  But the whole point of such Lojbanicness, IMHO, is that it allows you to write text which isn't twisted up like that at all, where everything is easy to find because it's put together piece by piece. 

Lojban can be a very difficult language if you pick it up by the wrong end.  It gives you some tools to make vague or not-so-vague back references, but that terrain is really quite sketchy and spotty.  I think that Lojban feels much more at home with forward reference, with laying one's pieces out before putting them together.  That doesn't mean that you have to think of everything before you say anything, quite the opposite.  It just means that you think of a different kind of thing first-- you build a foundation of referents, discussing what you're going to discuss, and then start to whirl them up into situations. 

The "simpleness of Lojban", or S.  S is evident when "speaking in a Lojbanic way", or L, but S is less evident when to'e L.  One example of S is that English would have a lot of trouble referring to S by this point, but since I am L, both references are easily available.  In order to properly L, it's true that I may have to "plan some references ahead of time", or R.  But if I'm in the habit of Ring while I L, then it will still be very S. 

"The way I usually write/think in Lojban", goi ko'a.  ko'a is fragmented.   ko'a is choppy.  ko'a references the same things over and over.  ko'a references them again.  ko'a references and references.  ko'a doesn't try to be like English.  ko'a is the opposite of English.  Speaking in Lojban zo'u; there's various styles.  ko'a is my style.  Your style, let's call it ko'e.  You make ko'e good.  You improve ko'e.  You make ko'e clear.  ko'e isn't ko'a.  ko'a is choppy.  ko'a repeats references.  ko'a is fragmentary.  How is ko'e clear?  How is ko'e Lojbanic?  Does ko'e repeat?  Ko'e short?  ko'a sometimes is long, like this, stretching out a particular thought, but then doesn't expect to refer to that stretchy thought, as stretchy thoughts are lost to specific reference, it's true.  ko'a chooses out particular things from "long, stretchy thought sentences",  goi ko'i.  ko'a takes the time to drag references out of ko'i when those references seem useful enough.  ko'a takes.  ko'a carefully steals from the ko'i.  how does ko'e take references from ko'i?  ko'e steals from ko'i?  ko'e short?  ko'e repeats?  ko'e steals how?  you think about ko'e, i recommend.  

mu'o mi'e se ckiku