Re: temporary absense from net

[nsn (Nick Nicholas)]

I'm back on the net, and apparently I'm on mullian for a bit. I'll try and
convince the local guru to let me stay on mullian, as I'm officially an
ElecEng postgrad (I'm doing Cognitive Sc via Elec this year); if not, I'll
resurface on a CompSci machine. You'll be kept duly posted.

I've mailed you $100 AUS ($66 US) for my LLG account, in an International
Money Order.

Nice to see the list talkative; pity I don't have the time right now to
actively participate, but I think some sense of direction is arising from
out the rubble.

Place structure... well, it won't be a typical Cowan paper, all nicely
didactic. The first section will have to be --- in which I show the basic
manner of deriving place structures. It's basically your method: pick
from the places of the component gismu those places which are relevant to
the definition of the {lujvo se sinxa}; couple with some dikyjvo-derived
ideas on how the places should be ordered for predictability by other
users presupposing no familiarity with the {lujvo se sinxa}. However (and
this need not delay dictionary production), I intend to use Ivan's classes
of tanru as a tool in analysing which types of lujvo place structure go
with which types of component tanru. Some clear patterns are already
discernable.

The write-up of the first section may start as soon as Friday, certainly
next week. I'm finishing my summer job Friday, and start classes week
after next.

It is a pity things have turned out as they have with MEX. Personally I
doubt MEX will ever be worked through to our satisfaction. I'm not sure
which action I should take given John's reluctance to confront me on my
usage. I'm tempted to produce more MEX {zirjbo} :) and force matters to
a head --- but if John is really taking matters to heart (btw, is he getting
cc's of your mail these days?) then that's obviously not diplomatic.

I have heard nothing from Johnstone (and no longer subscribe to conlang;
my summer job has meant I've had to minimise net access time). Tim Mansfield
I bump into every now and then; he's on soc.bi, and I'm his net Esperanto
tutor. He's very busy with thesis work right now (haven't had Esperanto
exercises from him in a month), but he was genuinely interested in Lojban.
He made the inevitable proglang/conlang analogy: Lojban is to Scheme as
Esperanto is to Pascal. (Having spent a month programming in Pascal, I
wouldn't be too smug about that if I were an Esperanto-supremacist. On the
other hand, I have a distaste for LISPoids. Incidentally, whatever happened
to Guy Steele? It was only when I read _The Hacker's Dictionary_ that I
realised we had a celebrity in our midst on lojlist in '90!)

I offered to meet Jacques Guy earlier last year, but in our brief email
correspondence, he doesn't seem really interested in Lojban: he finds it
too complex for his needs. To tell the truth, a Basic Lojban could readily
be constructed (and with our tendency to use transformational techniques
and deep structures to analyse Lojban, such a Lojban would be a helpful
bootstrap for the remainder of the language, as well as an interesting
language in its own right: the *essentials* of Lojban are quite slim. 
Btw, I don't know how much putative scientific interest a Basic Lojban
would have; I for one consider transformational accounts of language quaint,
and in fact virtually all linguists these days do --- Chomsky has fled from
it to GB, which to me seems like Ptolemaic epicycles.)

Talk to you soon.

"Kai` sa`n swqh~kan t'akriba` piota`,           N N O  nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au
 kai` sa`n plhsi'aze pia` [h [w'ra te'sseres,   I I L  IRC:nicxjo RL:shaddupnic
 sto`n e'rwta doqh~kan eutuxei~s."              C C A  University of Melbourne.
  K.P.Kaba'fhs, _Du'o Ne'oi, 23 E'ws 24 Etw~n_  K H S  *Ceci n'est pas un .sig*