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Re: [lojban] Re: Towards Lojban for Beginners version 2.0

Adam Chevalier wrote:

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.
That would apparently be a disagreement between you and whichever author wrote that example.
Assuming that this is the Chinese name, we did adopt some standardized rules for Lojbanization of phoneme sets in consultation with a couple of native speakers. You may have a legitimate disagreement with whatever was decided then, and it could be that an example using phonemes where there is some disagreement on how to transcribe them is not the best example for a beginner text. 


If there intention was to teach that lesson, important as it is, they
should have used a proper example.


Perhaps.  But they used the example that they did.


     > 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.
That is the usual implication when one complains about the emphasis on malglico, and the emphasis on malglico is specifically to counter the tendency for (especially new) native-English Lojbanists to encode their English phrasings based on Lojban keywords. 


But the seeming emphasis on malglico can come across as insulting,
especially with gotchas like ninmu.


Anyone learning a language needs to have a thicker skin than that.
Malglico usages ARE a serious problem for beginners, and it needs to be repeatedly emphasized. If one is insulted by the reminders, then perhaps one is too easily insulted. There is no one who has spoken Lojban longer than Nora and myself, and yet we still sometimes screw up on this problem. 


     > 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. I'm talking about
meta-linguistic terms.
Words /about/ language that are thrown around that beginners are not
likely to understand.
Those include "gismu" and "tanru", etc. Maybe YOU understand them, but I've dealt with many a beginner who did not. But they did a lot better when we used the Lojban word, then when we used the English-equivalent jargon.
Now maybe you are talking about some other English jargon words that have not been given Lojban words. But you do not identify the words that bothered you, so I had to make a guess. 

lojbab

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