[lojban-beginners] Re: A Newbie's First Impressions

[G Dyke <gordon.dyke@bluewin.ch>]

> First off, I have to say that learning a language in
> silence is quite hard.  Yes, I don't know anyone who
> speaks or cares to speak Lojban.  But that aside, I'm
> not very good at phonetics (which is weird since my
> generation grew up with phonetics in schools, before
> the "Hooked on Phonics" craze).  I think I am
> pronouncing some of these words correctly, but trying
> to use Lojban phonetics to spell cities or names... I
> think I'll just use "y" everywhere.
Try http://www.lojban.com/twiki/pub/Files/SoundFiles
for stuff spoken by many different people.

> "porc." is supposed to be the brand of car, Porsche,
> which is two syllables.  Should it be "porcys." in
> Lojban, I have no idea.
In French, where there is no /E/ at the end of words (or is it no /e/? 
no matter anyway), we pronounce Porsche as {porc.}

> My first impression of Lojban is it is littered with
> articles.  Perhaps there are more elegant forms of
> phrasing sentences, but so far I've learned the
> following:
>
> fe lei su'o re cukta pu dunda fi le pa tamne pe la
> tonis. fa la klaudias.
>  
They aren't *really* articles. I look upon the gadri as being 
"extractors" of one of the sumti of a brivla. Then, there are numbers, 
which we usually don't bother with in lojban, because they *aren't that 
important*.

Reordering is usually not very useful.  If you really want to focus on 
"the-at-least-two-books", use a se conversion.

> Ofcourse, this sentence may have some articles in the
> wrong order, I'm just learning the language.  And yes,
> I did put it in the passive voice and attempted to do
> the past tense just to add more articles.
oh, ok. Then they're not articles as I understood them. But lojban being 
unambiguous, it does need a lot of grammatical structure words. You left 
out a whole bunch which are elidable:

i fe lei su'o re boi cukta ku cu pu dunda fi le pa boi tamne pe la tonis 
ge'u ku fa la klaudias vau
fortunately, lojban enables to say
i la klaudias. dunda lei cukta le tamne pe la tonis.

> This leads into my next observation:  why does a
> language that prides itself on being unabmigious have
> a Zen-like approach to verb tense.  To say "mi klama"
> in no way tells you when that happens.  I can
> understand allowing such cases to exist, but the
> beginner's guide paints a picture that this neutral
> case is cultrually preffered. So far this baffles me.
The language prides itself on having an inambiguous grammar and on being 
able to lift the ambiguity concerning exact time, place, reason, 
relationship, feeling etc.

Otherwise, it also prides itself on being able to remove everything 
which is unnecessary to communication. (number, gendre, tense, 
protagonists etc)

> While conversational Lojban (atleast elementary) can
> be littered with articles, I love the power in fa, fe,
> fi, fo, fu.  Any sentence can be turned into a
> procedure or function call.  This is what appeals to
> programmers. 

> "dunda fa la djan. le cukta la klaudias."
>  
I see lojbanic programming as using "natural word order"

so {la djan dunda le cukta la klaudias} is equivalent to

? give(john, book, claudia}

> I do have a question.  I may be getting ahead of
> myself, but the lessons so far haven't specifically
> spelled this out, so I wasn't sure how it was done.
>
> "mi dunda fi la klaudias. fe xo ma"
>
> Can I use "xo" and "ma" together, and does their order
> matter ("ma xo")?  And before anyone yells foul, I
> haven't been exposed to any Lojban culture outside of
> the beginner's guide, so saying "I gave Claudia how
> many what?" works to direct the listener's attention
> better than "I gave how many what to Claudia?"
I'll reinforce that lojban culture doesn't seem to like FA tags. The 
exceptions seem to be for single sumti sentences which require a long 
sumti before you actually get to the brivla, like {cumki fa lenu mi 
klama} = "It is possible that I come" (nu mi klama means "x1 is the 
event of (I come)"). And again for sentences where there are several 
short things to be said, it is easier to push complicated things to the 
back. To quote animal farm: one FA good, to FA bad.

you can use xo ma together, in that order and it works very well. In the 
other order, it is ungrammatical just as

{la djan dunda le cukta pa} is incorrect. (the pa would attach itself to 
the following sumti if there were one.

mu'o mi'e greg