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Re: [lojban] Re: Le Petit Prince: Can we legally translate it?



At 12:10 PM 9/13/02 +0200, Lionel Vidal wrote:
>We could always translate linguistics, something we are used to doing
>%^)  Comrie, who has interest in constructed languages, would seem a person
>likely to give permission to translate, perhaps especially his Typology
>book which was germinal in my early Lojban design effort.

Not so far from linguistic and rather recently published is the CCL : at
least here is a recent book whose copyright problems could surely be
dealt with :-)

CLL I presume you mean. Certainly it would be easier to translate Cowan's prose into Lojban than that of most philosophers, and I think it would be a lot easier than the Lojban-only dictionary

More seriously, IMHO there is nothing like a well-written grammar book in
the very language it describes to motivate and help a devoted student.

I dunno. I would mostly be motivated to read something in Lojban that was not easily locatable in English. Something written in Lojban, with the current level of skill of most writers, would be as likely to confuse as to enlighten.

Besides, many will see it as a kind of indirect proof of that language
expressive possibilities.

I should think that we've proven that a long time ago. The problem is not expressivity, but skill of the expressor and understandability on the part of the unskilled reader, especially since Lojban more than other artificial languages tends to attract people who are not necessarily all that skilled at learning or speaking foreign languages.

Anyway, don't you think it would be quite a challenge to explain lojban
notions like brivla or selbri or the tense system intricacies in lojban :-)

If we can explain it in English, we can explain it in Lojban. But would anyone bother to understand when they can read and understand it more easily in English.

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org