[lojban] Chrestomathy

["Gregory Dyke" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Those of you who return to lojban.org to seek out the changes Robin has made
every time he makes them, will have noticed that there is a project to
collect a Chrestomathy. That is nothing new; what is, is that I'm the guy
who said he'd oversee getting things done.

Until mid-July, that's very easy: I'll have almost no free time, so nothing
will get done by me (although I'd like to have the feeling of having
accomplished something, which is why I'm writing this now).

So, basic plan:

- I write up my manifesto so that I can't cut and run as soon as a certain
number of texts are collected. This will impose some sort of standard on the
finished product (a "real" book) and its contents (I'll come to that in a
minute).
- The texts get collected. This means either me going out and finding them,
or people who wrote them sending them in (obviously, I'm cool with the
latter)
- They get vetted: proofreading (not only by me), going through the official
parser and, reluctant as I am to do this, adding of full stops where
required (no prizes for guessing who I'm talking about here)
- Then come the extras, which will form part of the "manifesto". I'm
thinking along the lines of vocabularys (yeah, don't worry, I will use a
*dictionnary* for my English!) for each piece, so that it can be
speed-learnt to avoid readers from having to look up words every five
seconds, English translations, stylistic and grammatical comments on some of
the usage and maybe a piece on the stylistic and grammatical issues involved
in the writing of lojban.
-Then, I get to write the whole thing up in docbook or texinfo or some such
stuff
- Then, I wash my hands of the whole thing and it becomes part of the POD
commity's problems :)

Texts:

the sooner you start sending me stuff, and the more there is of it, the more
compelled I will feel to get some work done. Here are some of the
requirements:

- Longer than the average piece. Lojbab seemed to think 1000-10000 words.
I'd say the length of the first chapter of Alice, give or take a few
paragraphs is about right (or maybe my memory betrays me I think I'm
underestimating that chapter's length). Poetry would obviously be shorter...
- Original writing is really good (do we have any that long?), so are
"different" styles: poetry, plays, all tanru etc...
- The piece you submit must not have any copyright problems and the ideal
would be that you be in agreement with allowing the LLG to place the whole
thing in the public domain (entirely negociable, but we can't have "the
little prince", for instance)
- You must agree to enter into discussion with me about the modification of
your piece. In some cases, I'll probably have to let you have the final
word, but I will not have "na ka'e" replaced by "ka'enai" on grounds that
your piece is usage and that you want your usage to make "usage decide".
This chrestomathy is not supposed to be a reflection of what usage is like,
but of how the baselined language can be best used to express what you'd
like to say. It should set a standard of what "good" lojban should be. It
should be a valid point for someone to say "this is how such and such was
expressed in the Chrestomathy" in defence of what they have written.
- Among others, there will probably be a piece from the bible, one from
Alice, some poetry, hopefully some Hamlet, an irc log (calling anyone who
remembers having an above averagingly interesting conversation on irc)
- I seem to remember having thought of other requirements, but that's quite
enough to go on for the time being. (oh yeah, difficulty is not a criteria -
outside that I'll probably put the easier pieces towards the beginning)

So anyways, let's get this show on the road

Greg