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

coi travis

Am Dienstag, 22.04.03 um 20:37 Uhr schrieb Travis Garris:


I've run across Lojban before, and I like the idea
behind it.  I've just recently started learning it.  I
suspect that there are lots of programmers in the
Lojban community, and that we are probably all drawn
by the same thing.  I'm just another programmer.

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.
You will get much less "y" when you come from other languages (like e.g. german). Robin often bitches how he does not like his name being spelled out in lojban. From the english pronounciation it would be something like rabyn. The same name in german pronounciation would be spelled out robin. When you want to preserve the original spelling you can just use la'o [word describing language][original spelling][word describing language]instead of la[lojban spelling].
So you could say "mi nelci la'o dy. porsche dy." (usually gy. is used for english words and similarly dy. for german or fy. for french but you could also say "mi prami la'o sindarin arwen undumiel sindarin" - or was that quenya?) 


One of my problems in this area is the following words
used as examples in "Logban for Beginners":  nis. and
porc.  I would expect "nis." to be pronounced as
"knee".  It is supposed to be Nice, France.  J'ai
étudié français for duex ans, and I thought that Nice
was pronounced as "niece".  How to represent that in
Logban, I have no idea.
Well with Nice the pronounciation depends on wether you ask a northern french or southern french speaker. I found that in southern france people tend to and an "e" or "y" (or something in between) to names. So you might get Nice spelled out as nisys. from a southern french guy.
This "add a consonant or drop the last vowel" rule is pretty ambiguous, though. But names from different languages are a problem you often can't solve nice and clean. Just think of the english names for München, Köln or Mönchengladbach. So, names get changed when they are used in a different language... 


"porc." is supposed to be the brand of car, Porsche,
which is two syllables.  Should it be "porcys." in
Lojban, I have no idea.
Yeah, from the correct german pronounciation I would also spell it out la porcys. 



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:
Well, you need all those articles to have an unambiguous grammar. Without the articles you couldn't tell sumti apart from parts of tanru.
"mi klama le zarci dinju" means "I am going to the trading-type-of-building", which is quite different from "mi klama le zarci le dinju" 


fe lei su'o re cukta pu dunda fi le pa tamne pe la
tonis. fa la klaudias.
I think fa-fe-fi should only be used rather sparsely. Most of the time they are only used when some of the sumti are omitted.
So when you want to say "I will come by car" instead of saying "mi ba klama zo'e zo'e zo'e le karce" you use fo to say "mi ba klama fo le karce" and make things shorter and simpler.
But in your sentence you actually used all of the sumti-places but just shifted them around like crazy. 

You can have this much shorter and easier to understand:

la klaudias.  pu dunda su'o re cukta le la tonis. tamne
The way I said it does not specifically imply that the books where given en masse (Claudia could have given Tony's cousin one book on Xmas and another for her birthday) (and numbers imply a lo article if you omit the article so "re cukta" is the same as "re lo cukta") and I did not specify that it was only one cousin the book was given to. But then again: you need to ask yourself if those factoids are really important enough to make a point about them. The person you tell this might already know that Tony got only one cousin or that you are talking about only one of his cousins. And it may not be important at all if you gave the books to the cousin all at once or one at a time (anyway, she got them now).
If you want to put emphasize on the "at least two books" you can just ad a "ba'e" (which means emphasize next) before the word you want to emphasize.
If you want to just say that Tony's cousin was given at least two books (but don't say or know by whom) you would probably want to use se-te-ve-xe instead of fa-fe-fi and say: 

le la tonis. tamne cu te dunda su'o re cukta


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.
No, it looked like you got the grammar correct. You just overcomplicated things. 


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.
Well, there's a difference between grammatical ambiguity and semantical ambiguity. The lojban grammar is pretty unambiguous, but you only need to take the semantical unambiguity as far as you want to. If you've been talking about an upcoming trip all along, there is probably no point in using the tense again and again.
You can actually start a story with ".i puzuvuku" and thus set a tense (long ago, far away) for the whole story and then forget about the tense altogether unless you have to make a point about some events not fitting the story-line. In english or german you have to drag the tenses along all the way. You can do that in lojban, too. But why would you want to?
Also when you say things like "mi cliva" it is usually pretty clear what tense applies. You don't have to add a tense to make sure that everybody understands that you are very soon beginning to leave. So, why bother? 


There are a few other things that seem out of place.
I like that each number uses each of the five vowels
in turn, but they use apparently random consonants.
And I find myself pronouncing "xa" and "ze" very
similarly.
I'll send a short clip of myself pronouncing xa and ze to your personal email. 


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."


Well, I would suggest not to use this unless it makes things simpler.
se-te-ve-xe is usually much more useful. You can use those to get a whole bunch of new words out of those 1300 something gismu.
You can e.g. say "mi nelci le se dunda" (or build "seldu'a" from the rafsi forms of "se" and "dunda") to express that you like the gift. That's a very powerfull feature of lojban that gives you a whole bunch of words that are hidden in the gismu definitions.
That way you get the words for destination (selkla), origin (terkla), route (velkla) and means of travel (xelkla) free with klama.
You could also use it do some "passive" sentences. Like: "le cukta cu se dunda" to say "the book is given". 


This may not be cultrually sound in Lojban, it is a
grammatical challenge in English.  You run the risk of
confusing any parser with the verb conjugation and
prepositions required.  When all sentences are put in
this passive, verb-first format, a computer could very
easily parse Lojban text (sorry for not using bridi,
selbri, or other Lojban-specific terms, I'm not
confident yet).
You don't have to do this (to your fellow human readers who get confused by sumti being shifted around) to parse lojban. Try jbofi'e (lojbanic fish) at http://etud.epita.fr:8000/~poss_r/lojban/jboski.html 

jbofi'e is really usefull to check sentences you have built.


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")?
Yes you can do that (jobfi'e does not complain). And the order does matter. The question-words have to be in the places of the words you are asking for. So the xo has to be in front of the ma, since numbers always go before the things that are counted. 


 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?"
Well, this is a case where the use of fa-fe-fi might be justified. But maybe you should not go by the english (or german, it's the same there) sound of it. I find this shifting around of the sumti more confusing than helpful. That might just be me, though. 

mu'o mi'e ian.

--
Jan Pilgenroeder
Theaterstr. 59
52062 Aachen