[lojban-beginners] Re: Site for beginners was: vlatai and logflash

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Sunday 20 December 2009 20:55:49 Oren wrote:
> Category 1: Experienced people. They're likely not fluent in lojban,
> but they're literate. They may be amateur or professional linguists,
> programmers or just self-motivated, and so they treat lojban very
> differently; more like a programming language; i.e. a tool or
> resource. So it's completely natural that there be an online place to
> post builds, projects, ideas and esoteric debates for lojban.
>
> Category 2: New people. They hear about lojban and see lojban.org and
> think "Hey, maybe I'll try to learn this." And then they go view one
> of the several endorsed learning materials. But they treat lojban like
> a human language, and there's nowhere to ask questions on the site,
> and no user forum (so no way of knowing that others are studying too).
> So when they come back to visit and try to find more materials, they
> see a bunch of seemingly non-functional 'works in progress' mixed in
> with vocabulary lists-- and they don't come back a third time.
>li'o
> What I think is missing:
> beginner website -> Beginner's resources, discussion, intro to lojban
> development

I agree that for the new people, we should treat Lojban like any other human 
language. It (or rather the Loglanic languages, including Loglan also) has 
features found in no other (AFAIK) language family, such as a potentially 
infinite number of arguments instead of an accusative or ergative alignment. 
But then, Afro-Asiatic languages have templatic morphology, and Mayan 
languages have a unique part of speech.

There's a standard sentence-glossing format among linguists: You write a 
sentence in the language being studied, then translate each morpheme, putting 
cmavo and their rafsi in caps. I'd like to see this done to Lojban sentences, 
or in Lojban to sentences of other languages. E.g.:

i le nu se citka cu funca le tordu sastu'u lacpu
SENT.SEP DEF EVENT PASS2 eat PRED.MARK luck.of DEF short grass-tube pull
The event of being eaten is the luck of the short straw puller.

On ?tiras à la courte paille pour savoir qui serait mangé.
INDEF.PRON pull-PAST.2SING at/to DEF-FEM short-FEM straw for know-INF who 
be-COND-3SING eat-PP-MASC
Someone pull the short straw to know who would be eaten.

The second word in the French is ungrammatical, but that's the way it's sung.

Useful material for newbies would be lots of examples of use of prepositions 
and tense markers, both with and without objects. In particular, the 
relationship between tense markers used as such, tense markers used in 
the "ica'obo" construction as sentence connectors, and tense markers used as 
prepositions is a bit confusing. Also some examples of, if I have an 
interjection in English or some other natlang, how to say it in Lojban, would 
be useful.

Also try to explain Lojban without using Lojban grammatical terms, using 
standard linguistic terms. It's impossible to do this completely (even in 
French one uses terms like "passé composé" when explaining the grammar in 
English), but we should call prepositions "prepositions", not "modals", which 
is what "ka'e" is.

Pierre
-- 
When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates.
Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.