Re: Textbook Status

[John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>]

la lojbab. cusku di'e

> The draft textbook is  very drafty, being a compendium of two separate efforts
> to write such a textbook (chapter 1 is the start of the second effort,
> and I never even finished that first chapter; the remaining chapters are
> from my original 1989 draft textbook of 6 lessons, which John Cowan broke
> up into 20-30 pieces, dropped completely those that were nontrivial to
> bring up-to-date, made minor corrections, and then organized into the
> current chapter order.)

Actually, the current order is the same as the former order.  Each
of the 6 chapters of the "old draft" was actually split into 3 parts,
making 18 parts.  All I did was remove stuff that the new chapters 0
and 1 made irrelevant.  Probably the current chapter 22 *should* be
completely dropped, as it depends on an obsolete theory of
comparatives, but even that wasn't done.

> [T]he current arrangement effectively randomizes that outline.

Nah, just truncates it.

> It is likley that at some point, John or someone will go through one more
> time, delete any sections that contradict the reference grammar, make some
 more
> minor corrections, and call this the "first textbook",and we may publish
> this in a relatively limited edition (since I am sure that I can do MUCH
> better, when I actually get around to writing a textbook again, and would
> not want to have a thousand copuies of THAT book sitting around in my
> basement for a couple years.

Just so.

> We hope to have a parser that matches the final reference grammar formal
> grammar (the parser on the web/ftp sites was made more than two years before
> the referebce grammar was done, and has many minor differences from the book,
> most of which do not affect beginners, but still leaves the current parser
> quite unsatisfactory.)

Working on it.  Some of my materials for transforming a grammar into
what the parser needs seem to have vanished (my Lojban materials got
scrambled a few years ago and I haven't completely recovered yet).
With luck they'll turn up this week.


> (I should probably uopload
> the latter, though, after I check it to make sure that all changes are
> indeed valid).

Please do.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)