[lojban-beginners] Biting off way more than I can chew -- and loving it!

[Gearhead Shem Tov <bnansel@internode.on.net>]

This is my first post about lojban ever.  I'm a Yank expat living in
Adelaide, South Australia.  I'm a recovering engineer, a published SF
author, and I'm currently studying to be a sculptor (long story...).

I'm also a dire lojban newbie, and after years of furtive peeks at
the language, I want to finally make a serious attempt to learn it.  I
propose as my first foray into lojbanistan a short story translation.
In the spirit of "anything worth doing is worth overdoing" and since I
have a science fiction writerly disposition, the logical point of
departure for me would be to translate a substantial SF story.

I have studied a couple languages very different to English -- two
years each of Japanese and German, with a smattering of Hebrew,
Russian, Spanish, and Swedish (and FORTRAN, Pascal, Modula 2, and
Forth :), so I know this project is very ambitious.  I figure I'll
take it a sentence at a time with the notion that I'll have to ask
lots of naive questions and my translations will be crap at the
outset.  As I progress I hope my questions will become monotonically
more interesting and the translation correspondingly smoother.  To
keep me motivated I would probably blog the whole process (unless
somebody has a better suggestion); perhaps other beginners would find
such a blog of interest.

But what story to translate?  I wouldn't want to use any of my own
published stories (my ego is large, but not that large).  It would
need to be another author's story, a story that I admire that is
either in the public domain or the translation rights to which I could
easily obtain.  It would be a bonus if the story had something to do
with linguistics and translation, something that would force me to
thoroughly grasp lojban meta-language constructs beyond learning
workaday gismu, cmene, and cmavo.

By chance a few days ago I came across my favourite H. Beam Piper
story online, Omnilingual from Astounding Stories, 1957.  To my
astonishment I found it is available as a Project Gutenberg text.

It's some 16K words -- about 1K sentences.  OK, so it's more a novella
than a short story.  Still,  I reckon it would take me a year if I
average three sentences per day.

So, here is Naive Question # 1 (NQ1):

In my cursory reading of lojban orthography I've found no instance of
an mn consonant cluster, but neither have I found a rule clearly
forbidding it.  Would .OMni.LINguyl. be a reasonable -- or even legal
-- lojbanisation of "Omnilingual"?  Or would it need to be more
like .omyniLINguyl. ?

Thanks!

-Bobby

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