On Friday, February 22, 2013 6:59:53 PM UTC-6, lojbab wrote:
Adam Chevalier wrote:
> I had considered making my own version of L4B to take care of some
> things that, personally, put me off.
> There were a couple of Excercises that were "gotchas" and you don't want
> those in learning material for beginners
> (Mistranslating taipei under the auspices of "a b sounds like a p in the
> local orthography" is a terrible excuse and it made it sound like Robin
> was showing off)
> Of course, by reading this board for several months I know it wasn't
> intentional.
Actually, LFB was written by Nick Nicolas and Robin Turner, and the
example may have been used intentionally with international students
(who probably know English well enough to use LFB) in mind, rather than
to "show off". The point is that the English pronunciation of foreign
names is often NOT a legitimate basis for Lojbanizing that name. You
want the native/local pronunciation if possible.
That isn't my point. taibei, as a lojbanized name, isn't how its pronounced locally or in English.
If there intention was to teach that lesson, important as it is, they should have used a proper example.
> Some other recommendations:
>
> 1) Try not to emphasize the concept of malglico so much.
Absolutely, one should do so. Lojban is NOT encoded English, and if one
gets lazy, one will not be understood (or will be intentionally
misunderstood by some people who are literal-minded and don't like
malglico).
I don't remember stating that Lojban was encoded English, or even implying it.
But the seeming emphasis on malglico can come across as insulting, especially with gotchas like ninmu.
> You /have/ to
> explain lojban in English terms in order to teach it to an English
> audience, so translating ninmu to x1 is a woman and scolding the learner
> for assuming it means an adult isn't right (by the way, we have a word
> for ninmu, its called female).
No. fetsi is the word for female, but is not limited to human(oid)s.
ninmu is a female human(oid) being, not necessarily adult. nixli is
expressly a girl (immature ninmu). The definition of ninmu in the gismu
list specifically says that it is not necessarily an adult, so a learner
who assumes contrary to that definition probably deserves "scolding"
(though preferably in a gentle, constructive tone).
It doesn't matter whats in the gismu list, we are talking about LFB.
LFB specifically translates it as x1 is a woman. If you are going to translate it to English improperly you cannot scold them for misunderstanding.
The proper translation for ninmu, based on those gismu you just gave me, is x1 is a female humanoid.
> 2) Find ways to explain the concepts without resorting to "If you're a
> Mathematician, computer programmer, or a logician, its like these things."
For some things derived from formal systems, like lambda calculus, I
suspect that it is difficult to manage this, but good luck.
I'm not talking about lambda calculus, i'm talking about predicate logic.
Saying "For programmers, its like a parameter." And then just drop it for everyone else.
That is all I'm getting at. I'd like to see Lojban expand beyond hobbyists and people in Math related fields.
> 3) Concepts and words related to language studies are confusing, please
> give some kind of definition for these concepts.
Technical terminology will often be opaque to someone not trained in the
relevant field. I was confused about grammar terms for years including
the first couple of years AFTER I started separating Lojban from TLI
Loglan. And even worse, sometimes technical terms have different
meanings in colloquial English (e.g. the classic misuse of "theory" by
creationists). The latter is why I went to using the Lojban words
untranslated. There really is no English translation of tanru that does
the concept justice.
I'm not talking about gismu, and tanru, and jbo'ivla.