lojban newbie: an outsider looking in

["Michal Wallace (sabren)" <sabren@manifestation.com>]

.ui coi rodo

  I'm fairly new to lojban, curious, and confused. Over the
past few days I've been reading the lojban website and the
archives for this list, trying to decide whether or not to
learn lojban. I decided I want to... and so, I have a whole
bunch of questions! Some of these are kind of critical, so
forgive me if I step on some toes. :)

  First of all, the written materials. As far as I can tell,
www.lojban.org hasn't been updated in about a year.  Should I trust
it? I mean, the textbook is on hold until the dictionary comes
out.. But the dictionary is expected in late 1997! Was the dictionary
ever finished? If not, who's working on it?

  My understanding is that while there are many root words (gismu) in
lojban, they don't account for every noun/verb/whatever you could say
in a natural language. So most things are described metaphorically
(tanru) by combining gismu. If the tanru catches on, it gets cooked
down into a compound word (lujvo). There is some kind of magical trick
to this process that ensures that no two lojban words are ever the
same. (a sad attempt: xu valsi drata valsi [for: "is it true that any
given word is [means something] different from any other word?] )

  Other than that lojban sentence, am I right so far? And if so, is
the textbook simply waiting on an expanded list of lujvo so people
don't have to talk in tanru as much? Isn't that a chicken and egg
problem? What mechanisms are in place for collecting new lujvo?

  It seems to me that this list itself is the most up to date
resource. One problem I've had is that it's hard to search. Onelist
will only let me search digests, egroups just has a terrible search
engine... I haven't reached the point of wanting to do this yet, but I
would suspect that words with periods and apostrophes won't be indexed
correctly, so searching the lojban texts in these two archives would be
especially difficult. Is there any other searchable archive?

  I'm considering creating a 'bot to get the entire archive from
egroups, saving it to my site, setting up my own little search engine,
and putting it all on my website...

  What work has been done in mechanically translating lojban into
english? I found one article on the .org site, and of course the
glossary generator. But does anyone actually have code to suck up
lojban and spit out English?

  LogFlash: Um.. I downloaded this. I ran it. It made me cry. :)
Looking through the archives, I managed to find references to it being
written in Pascal back in the 80's. Also, that Eric Raymond tried
porting it to C/C++. I couldn't find source for either.  Basically, I
think this software was probably great back in the 80's, but it
obviously came out long before the dawn of the modern user interface.
Simply porting it to C really doesn't make much sense to me - but
making a web based version in flash, or a high level scripting
language does.  I'm a web programmer by trade, and also have quite a
bit of experience with tutoring and accelerated learning methods.. I'd
be more than happy to lead a project to revamp the software. Would
anybody else be interested in this? Where could I get the legacy code?

  Also on the topic of software, I saw references to a GUI lojban word
processor. This reminds me very much of some work being done with the
python scripting language.. There's an editor written in python for
writing python, and it does stuff like syntax highlighting and what
have you... Python in general is a really quick language to pick up,
and can be compiled to run on a Java virtual machine, and could be
easily tied in with the Java speech libraries. It might be a good
place to start.. I'm a big supporter of the emacs idea, too. Has
anyone done anything with these?

  On the LLG : I understand it's not well funded (yet), but is it
a full time operation, or mostly run by volunteers? What does it
actually _do_ on a day to day basis?

  I get the feeling that one thing it _doesn't_ do is advocacy.  I
realize Lojban isn't really out to take over the world, but surely,
the more people that speak it, the more valuable it will be. Is anyone
doing anything about spreading the word? (Outside of conlang and
auxlang circles, I mean).. "Advocacy" might involve informing teachers
of alternative schools, organizing classes, keeping the website(s) up
to date, and coming up with more user-friendly learning materials,
books, CD roms, a phrasebook, etc, published under some kind of open
license so that the materials could be freely modified, copied, and
sold. [From my understanding, the LLG lost quite a bit of money on the
reference grammar. Perhaps that was avoidable.]

  Finally: is the flag/logo really working? I hunted it down to put on
the lojban website that I'm making... And decided against it. No
offense to whoever created it, but it's not a very powerful logo. The
lines and circles look kind of weak. Sickly, even. I haven't seen
anyone actually using it, so I kind of wonder if it ought to be
replaced. Is there a specific meaning to the arrows and interlocked
circles?

  I guess that's about it. Like I said, sorry if I stepped on any
toes. The newbie throws himself on the mercy of the list. :)

co'o mi'e maikl
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