Re: Funny loglan site

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 11:35 AM 2/22/99 +0200, Robin Turner wrote:
>From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
>
>la xod. cusku di'e
>
>> I wonder if there are any fluent Loglan speakers left, or if they've all
>> died out.
>
>{zo'o} so we should get someone from the Summer Institute of Linguistics to
>study them before Loglan undergoes language-death.

There never were any fluent TLI Loglan speakers, nor are there any.  In the
70s, JCB and a half dozen others who got togther for a month long group
study managed to get to the minimal sustained conversation level, but this
was with word lists in hand and constant deferral to JCB to help them find
or coin a word that was needed.  pc, one of those group-gropers, reports
that the "conversation" was more noteworthy for multiminute pauses than for
 fluency. JCB himself was not fluent either.  Indeed he has said that his
daughter spoke the language better than he ever did.  But she has been
invisible to the Loglan community for 10 years and never showed a lot of
interest in the language on her own.

Nora and I were probably among the few to ever converse in TLI Loglan
spontaneously.  I proposed to her in TLI Loglan (we had not yet started
Lojban development) and our wedding vows 6 months later were in TLI
Loglan-with-some-Lojban-gismu (and we conversed several times during our
honeymoon in the hybrid language of the time - there were by then around
1000 gismu remade, and each of us knew a subset of around 300 - a different
subset.  But the cmavo and grammar were still TLI Loglan).

Of course Lojban IS Loglan (by decree of the LLG membership), and hence a
fluent speaker of Lojban *is* a fluent speaker of Loglan, whether or not
JCB would approve of our use of the label.

TLI Loglan now seems to have a couple of people able to write or translate
coherently (most notably Lognet editor Leith) - I would say with the skill
that Jorge or Nick had 3 months after they started using the language.
There is little interactivity that shows that people read what is written
in Loglan without translation, and the language of the translation usually
betrays so many English idiomatic fallacies as to be laughable.  The TLI
community is still ignorant of sumti-raising and underuses abstraction
clauses.  They are also prone to trying to phrase things in "logic-speak"
with prenexes that are not accurate to the context - like they are
translating the English into predicate logic notation for a first year
logic course, and then translating the notation into TLI Loglan.  This
leads to overuse of universals, which seldom apply to the real world like
they do in a logic-model.

lojbab