Re: [lojban] Alice essay

doi la'oi wuzzy

I don’t know how to write an essay but I am halfway through reading the
text in Lojban.

From what I can say so far is that the text has many, many mistakes. I
have made a personal list of this while reading the text; At some
point, I think, I just gave up counting.

Here is a summary of what I’ve found so far:
- A few simple spelling mistakes.

Good find.

- “sai” is used in awkward places sometimes, like after a “na”. It
parses, but the meaning is undefined according to CLL

This is explicitly allowed according to the CLL:

You can also utter a scale indicator without a specific emotion. This is often used in the language: in order to emphasize a point about which you feel strongly, you mark what you are saying with the scale indicator “cai”. You could also indicate that you don’t care using “cu'i” by itself.

(http://dag.github.io/cll/13/4/)

- the strange construction “po'onai” is used somewhere, its meaning is
undefined AFAIK

Here, you are correct that it is not officially defined, however it is mentioned in the relevant BPFK section:

Add {po'o nai} ("among others") and {po'o cu'i} ("for one", "not excluding others").

(http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Section%3A+Highlight+Discursives)

- The ungrammatical construction “ka'enai” is used several times

This is a perfectly legitimate construction meaning "not able"

When attached to tenses and modals (see Chapter 10), the “nai” suffix usually indicates a contradictory negation of the tagged bridi.

(http://dag.github.io/cll/15/7/)

- There are multiple cases of sumti raising:

While I agree that sumti raising is poor lojban form, there is not consensus within the community.

- It seems the word “da” was sometimes intended to be used over a
sentence’s border, which is not directly allowed in Lojban

Again, I agree that this is poor form, but some within the community treat it as implied but not explicit connection.

- the quotation marks for the songs in chapter xa are missing

Again , I agree with you, but again, I think it's not as damning as you seem to imply.

- “krefu” is written “KREFU” (in all-caps) on two occasions. Lojban
does not allow writing like that

Oh, come on. Lojban also does not allow writing in Zbalermorna or Srilermorna, and the Cyrillic and Tengwar orthographies are unofficial; this is a really small nit to pick.

- a LOT of lujvo (see appendix) were coined, many of them do not have
dictionary entries yet and are not declared nonce words with “za'e”.

Overuse of {za'e} would ruin the work; also, many of the words you mention are not nonces, since it is perfectly reasonable to expect other works to use them in the same way.

And no, I am not talking about obvious lujvo with SE,
NAhE, NA, etc.

But you are talking about obvious lujvo with {-gau}, {-bi'o}, and {tol-}. Many of the words you're complaining about are "easy lujvo" (see [1] and [2]), which are standard constructions; e.g. you can't seriously expect {tolmilxe} to be misunderstood as anything but {to'e milxe}, and it is unnecessary to put each such construction into a dictionary (you might also want to read the case against a lujvo dictionary).

- I found 3 undefined fu'ivla so far. The same problems as for undefined
lujvo apply.

Stage 3 fu'ivla, are exactly for coining on the fly: "Stage 3 fu'ivla can be made easily on the fly, as lujvo can, because the procedure for forming them always guarantees a word that cannot violate any of the rules." (http://dag.github.io/cll/4/7/)

- For some reason, the text uses “’” instead ob “'”. The CLL says “'”
is used and never uses “’”.

Additionally, some experimental words are used: I noticed “gumri” and
“mu'ei” so far. You may think about experimental words what you want,
but you can’t truthfully call your text to be in Lojban if you use any,
but rather in a dialect of Lojban (maybe call it “experimental
Lojban”?).

This is a reasonable complaint; lojbab will not learn experimental words. That said, I think it is not so bad.

mu'o mi'e .arpis.