Re: Newby stuff

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>I Have a question: I'm blind and therefore purchasing the textbook would
>be useless for me as the braille transcription service at my disposal
>prioritises school and university texts. Is there a comprehensive grammar
>and wordlist online, or even an electronic version of the text available
>in ASCII, HTML or texinfo format?

Virtually all of our published material is on-line in some form, although
it often is not in nice format for screen reading (for example, our "gismu"
root word list has lines of almost 1000 characters for some words, at one
word per line).  Some of it has been HTMLized, but most is in raw text form
(ASCII).  The reference grammar (the book) is on the Xiron Web site in Finland
that is our semi-official Web site.  That site also contains a mirror of our
FTP site, so you can access essentially everything from there.  Note that the
HTML version of the reference grammar was not the final published version.
There are a few typos and unclarities, but any problems will be minor for
a beginner.  Other people are working on other sites that will contain
Lojban-related material as well.  The FTP site has around 25 Meg of data, by
the way.  The Xiron site obviously has even more.  (Oh, the major disadvantage
of the HTML reference grammar is that it has no index, but if you have a
good search utility you can remedy some of the problem caused by that lack.)

You can also find the ftp site listed in my signature line below.  There is a
file on the site that describes most of the other files, which I think the
is easy to find, but I never remember the name.

I also recommend asking on Lojban List for other people in Australia who
may be interested in working on the language with you,  The number varies from
time to time, but there are around a half dozen people on the Lojban List,
mostly from the Melbourne area, among our Australian supporters.  Also in
Melbourne, though not on the List since he is finishing a doctoral thesis,
is Nick Nicholas, who is generally regarded as the most fluent speaker of
the language when he isn't as rusty as he must be lately.  Last I heard,
he expected to finsh that thesis in a couple of months.

I am curious how you are able to read Lojban and other conlang materials on
the net when blind.  I presume that there are text-to-speech programs for
general text reading that are pretty good for English, but must horribly
mangle text in other languages.  We have sought a decent Lojban text-to-speech
generator for years, since this would be useful in teaching people to
hear and speak the language via the net.  Whatever solution you have found
might be quite useful for those of us who being sighted tend to focus too
much on the printed word.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab
    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";
    Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.