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[lojban] Re: the illogic of Lojban
mungojelly@ixkey.info wrote:
Newbies constantly innocently ask questions
that raise unresolved issues, even completely unexplored questions.
More importantly, they often ask them in ways that suggest that they
don't really understand what they are asking.
This has historically been a language-invention society, not a
language-education society, and naturally when interesting questions
are raised people voice a cacophony of opinions, but naturally it's
offputting to a newbie if what seems like a perfectly simple
question (and what in a finished language would be perfectly a
simple question) cannot get a simple answer.
I think that even in finished languages, these aren't simple questions.
Usually the non-simple questions have to do with translation.
Translation between languages is a deep subject, prone to error. One
wants to be sure that one understands the speaker's intent, and
sometimes the speaker hasn't really thought about their intent -
especially with usages that are idiomatic.
Moreover, if we are a teaching society, we have to give explanations and
not just simple answers. Explaining the reasoning can be long-winded
and complex, and if you oversimplify the explanation then you aren't
teaching.
> That's inescapable,
though; many questions really cannot yet be answered well or
answered at all; Lojban's not done.
But it is done, at least for purposes of answering beginners. All
questions can be answered. The answers might not satisfy non-beginners,
but then that is true of answers about every language.
The real problem is that no one in the community has any real expertise
in language education, and from what I've seen, most of us who have
studied other languages are atypical, so that what works for us often
doesn't work for others.
None of this excuses us as a community from overcoming such obstacles.
To me an obvious first step is to draw a bright line between
inward-facing language design (tinkering, experimentation,
exploration), and outward-facing simplification and education.
I think that was part of the idea behind the "beginners list".
> That's
right, we should lower ourselves to the lie of simplification; don't
respond to a simple question with a list of exceptions.
The problem is identifying what "the simple question" is.
I believe also
that we ought to establish a taboo against unsolicited corrections: if
someone says "mi cilre la lojban." (I learn Lojban, incorrectly
phrased), we should say "mi gleki lo nu do cilre fi la lojban." (I'm
happy you're learning about Lojban), positive reenforcement and
providing a good model, not "Lojban can't be in the second place of
cilre!
I want to avoid correcting you on this, but one can name anything %^)
But I agree with your strategy.
We should also work on creating explicit structures to help ease new
people into the language.
That is one reason why, in my early writings, I always provided literal
as well as colloquial translations of all my texts.
> One which seems like a nobrainer to me is to
indicate to newbies which words (for instance, which of the gismu) to
learn first,
The gismu list has two built in suggested orders out in columns 155-160.
One is the order I designed into the original unfinished textbook,
which has a number 1 to a for lessons 1-9 and 10+ followed by a letter
which grouped the words in each lesson.
The second is a word usage frequency (sort descending, obviously).
> and then write & speak to newbies with a heavy emphasis on those words.
Outside the beginners list, who writes and speaks specifically to
newbies? Generally we are writing for the larger audience.
> I've been working on creating that sort of structure to
help newbies into the language, and I've found it a surprising amount
of work.
I'll agree with that, having tried it.
> Still, it's a shame that such things haven't been anyone's
priority for so many years.
They were my priority, but I simply didn't have the needed skills.
> It's only very recently that we've even
had rudimentary things like simple illustrated books or vocabulary
lists with pictures.
I am not an artist.
Copyright on illustrations is tricky. LLG can't publish anything using
clipart unless we know that the pictures are legally free for such use.
Given that our early history was tied up in intellectual property law,
we have been sensitized to this issue.
What someone does on their own web page is their own business, though.
The much commoner (if less "superior") paradigm for community access
on the
internet is the web based forum.
There is, BTW, a perfectly active Lojban web forum:
http://community.livejournal.com/lojban/
There's been a trickle of activity there forever, and I don't know why
it's not taken seriously by the community.
I don't do web forums; I don't like the interface. Email and newsgroups
only.
For a time the wiki itself was a sort of web-based forum, with dozens of
people making changes to a variety of pages every day. But it
eventually got so large that no one could keep track of what was
changing. It also didn't involve those of us who didn't wiki. The
community is large but not so large that we can split our efforts into
too many media when people don't have time to follow them. As it is,
apparently great gobs of discussion have apparently taken place on IRC
over the years, but never when I logged in so I gave up on it.
> I'm an active Livejournal
user myself anyway, so I'm not really aware how hard it is to get an
account or whatever, is that the problem?
I have don't really even understand what Livejournal is, even. It
sounded like a blogging thing, and that is the impression I've had when
I've looked at Matt's. Some of us old-fogeys just don't really
understand the charm of blogging, and I've never looked into any of
these online interchanges, including the more well known Facebook and
Myspace.
As for getting an account, I find it a pain to open up yet another
account with yet another password that I will forget before the next
time I get around to accessing it. I avoid doing anything that makes me
fill out a registration form.
> Anyway I always follow that group
I don't follow anything that doesn't pump into my email box or a Usenet
newsgroup. By the time I get done with those two, I don't have time to
look for more things to interact with.
It's about time that Lojbanistan was larger than a couple of
mailing lists, IMHO.
It is larger.
But the mailing lists are the only place where you will reach a
relatively large audience, and a relatively large percentage of the
community.
> If people would recognize the effort that's been
put into establishing the Lojban Livejournal community, and consider it
a real part of Lojbanistan, that would be a good start.
I consider it a real part of Lojbanistan. But I don't have time to
regularly check yet another place for Lojban interaction, especially one
that requires me to log in in order to participate. I have the wiki and
IRC and SecondLife as three other known places that I can do the same
on, all of which are also part of Lojbanistan. But with limited time to
only follow one forum, the email variety works best for me.
There's still a few missing links between newbies and that living
language which is just starting to emerge. I see newbies all the time
on IRC being told not to take any of the learning materials seriously
because they're all out of date! That must be pretty discouraging.
It is also wrong. The official learning materials embody the official
language. Some people are playing a political game to make their
experimental and proposed usages become official by disparaging the
official stuff.
And of course even if they win, we don't see many people rewriting the
learning materials to reflect the proposals, and they won't really be
part of the language for most of us until someone rewrites CLL, etc. to
reflect them.
lojbab
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