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

[xavin@xavin.adhockery.net]

> 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.
> 
> 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.

You are complicating things significantly. The only place that I would
expect to see such a contorted sentence is in poetry. In most cases, the
speaker would put the places in order, only using the FA cmavo for
skipping any he/she wanted to leave out.

> 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.

Japanese does the same thing, almost. The present and the future use the
same tense. It is left up to the speaker to differentiate the two. If
the tense is not implicitly defined by context, a simple {ca ma} would
ask for an explicit time.

> 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.

The lessons that I have read and the html draft of the book both have
decent sections on the pronunciation of Lojban. I would look those over
if you have any problems.

With the 'x' sound: I do not see the problem with making it generally
the same as 'h' in English. I believe that the sound should come more
from the throat, than from the head. The pronunciation in Lojban does
not follow precise guidelines. Rather, a range of correct pronunciations
exist, and as long as the speaker gets close enough, his/her audience
will understand.

> 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."
> 
> 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).

There exists a yacc file defining the grammar of Lojban. I have found
it, but I do not remember where to locate it anymore. I think that in
many cases a computer can more aptly parse Lojban, but practice with the
language may convince me otherwise.

> 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?"

{ma} asks for a sumti, and a sumti always includes the number of things
it represents. Each article (le, lo, lei, loi, etc.) has a different
default, and if the default is not correct, the correct number must be
stated, or the bridi is false. In almost all cases, the default is
correct, but often not very helpful. The defaults can be found in
Chapter 6, section 7 of the html draft of the Lojban Grammar Reference.

So, using {xo} here is superfluous. It is already asked for by the
{ma}. 

Hope it helps
--Xavier Shirin