Re: misc practical questions

[Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group <lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx]

At 03:05 PM 5/28/99 +0200, you wrote:
>From: Max Kubierschky <max@isinet.it>
>FLUENCY
>-------
>On the Lojban website I've read, that fluency in lojban
>not yet has been achieved.
>* Is this true? Wrt what definition of fluency?

Ability to maintain conversation without conscious effort or noticeable
pause to hunt for words or proper grammatical phrasing. The word hunt is
the weak link, in my opinion, because we simply do not have sufficient
well-defined words in the lexicon to support the level of speech desired
by the typical college-educated adult who is learning the language. (By
comparison, I have had fluent conversation in Russian with 5 and 6 year old
Russian kids, but can hardly sustain conversation with adults because of my
lack of sufficient vocabulary).

>* For those of you that can speak it to some extent:
> - How would you describe your ability in speaking lojban?

When I haver been practicing (not recently), I am able to haltingly sustain
conversation for an indefinite period of time on any subject, without
recourse to dictionary or word list. I paraphrase around word gaps or coin
new words and phrasings. My listening comprehension lags my speaking
ability, and I do not always successfully parse others' spoken Lojban (and
I often cannot figure out intent when even mildly erroneous Lojban is spoken).

My wife Nora is somewhat less skilled at speaking, but better at listening
(she listens to me %^).

> - How much time did you invest in learning it?

Using LogFlash, my wife and I mastered the gismu list (97% accuracy on
recall of words given English keywords) in around 2 months of daily
practice for about an hour. By that time we had sufficiently mastered the
grammar and enough cmavo to easily sustain conversation between us. This
was back in 1988 when the grammar and vocabulary were not all that stable,
but even so the instability did not impede us. Vocabulary learning is key
to Lojban success.

>* Do you think that fluency can be achieved as well
> as in some natural second language?

Yes. Nick Nicholas, who is not on the list now, has demonstarted near
fluency - others perceive it as fluent speech, though he himself does not
(and he is a fluent speaker of several 2nd languages both natural and
artificial).

>MACHINE TRANSLATIONS
>--------------------
>My interest in lojban stems from its machine readability
>and I wonder if it could be used as an auxiliary language
>for internationalization of software and manuals.
>* Do you think that medium quality machine translations
> of technical documents from lojban to natural languages 
> can be possible in the near future?

The limitation is in the natural langauge side of the interface. If there
is an engine that could generate smooth text from coarse keyword glosses,
we would be very close in Lojban to English, since the parser/glosser can
output coarse keyword glosses. The major limitation here remains in the
lexicon - too few words are defined well enough for an MT program to
translate them.

> By medium quality I mean translations that are neither
> misleading nor annoying to read. Superb style is not
> requested.
>* Is there already work on the way?

Only to the level of the parser/glosser that I mentioned, which would be
"low quality" by any standard. Anything higher would take serious work,
probably funded research or graduate-studies research work, because the
person-months of work needed to produce the lexicon and reasonably fast and
sophisticated code are not going to be easily found among volunteers
working occasionally in their spare time.

lojbab
----
lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: 
see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ "
Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.