From gordon.dyke@bluewin.ch Sun Sep 16 04:53:21 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: gordon.dyke@bluewin.ch X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_2); 16 Sep 2001 11:53:20 -0000 Received: (qmail 39002 invoked from network); 16 Sep 2001 11:53:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 16 Sep 2001 11:53:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta2n.bluewin.ch) (195.186.1.211) by mta3 with SMTP; 16 Sep 2001 11:53:15 -0000 Received: from oemcomputer (62.202.41.231) by mta2n.bluewin.ch (5.5.043) id 3B952F43003CC09A for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Sun, 16 Sep 2001 13:53:14 +0200 Message-ID: <001301c13ea6$1fd48840$e729ca3e@oemcomputer> To: Subject: META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying) Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 13:52:13 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 From: "G. Dyke" coi rodo [I hope you don't think this post to be of no use whatsoever ; if you do, exercise your yoga before flaming - LOL] Having been following the discussions more closely than usual these past few days (hey! waiting for college to start gets pretty uneventful during the last months, I've got a lot of time), I've come to the conclusion that I'm missing a lot of the discussions because I've got no background on this. For instance, are these words specific to americans and those who've known them a long time or have they come about through lojban : "fiat" (as in "fiat decides..."), "glorking", "glorkjunkied" (aha! the latter two are related), elephant. Why do some people support and reject {gumri} ? (Don't you dare tell me to go to the wiki, last time my telephone bill had trouble coming out alive %^). I'm also puzzled by Nick (who, if I've got it right has spent one hell of a lot of time learning lojban) having views such as lojban never succeeding, rafsi not being a good idea and ... what else? I'd appreciate anyone who could help me by adding their beliefs and desires for lojban (and who could give any other information that might be relevant to newcomers - life around lojban-beginners is good but we want to graduate, there isn't the same element of risk involved in posting there as there is on lojban :-) Are there others who read the lojban-digest (not individual mails? surely!) avidely hoping to better their lojban, but not often putting their opinions forward because they're bound to lose against the sheer bulk of emails coming from opposers... An example of something that took me ages to understand : xod no longer signs his emails so and doesn't have xod in his address ; how's a newcomer supposed to work out who is referred to in the sentence "xod said...". Another thing... it took me a month to work out that pycyn was lojban for PC - who's name I eventually found in the reference grammar. This is NOT your fault but it should give you an idea of how complicated life is... Anyway, here's the list of information about me that might be useful, and that I'd like to know about you (so far I've worked out that you don't go arguing maths with pycyn - if you can help it - but knowing such things in advance might be useful) all of these are of course optional (as if you wouldn't tell me if this was not information that you'd put on www) Name: Gregory Dyke (greg.daik.) (which means sex : M ; what happenned to all the girls? I don't seem to have seen many! lol) DOB:84/26/02 (see? you can put it whichever way you like) Occupation: student, IT, EPFL, Switzerland Hobbies (things I do when I'm not doing smth else): skiing, programming, tolkien, his languages, lojban, working my way through w3c proposals (yep, the geeky type) What I think of lojban : hopefully, will help me uderstand what I'm saying and thinking if I'm not sure, gives an introduction to logic (I never realised that "a if b" was "a or not b"), makes for very powerful expressions - can't think of any right now %^) ; not likely to succeed for sapir-whorf, or as an international language. great potential though for the semantic web, for translating and for computer-human communication ... oh yes! and as a conlang worth learning. I wish I could teach my kids (If and when I have any) lojban, but it would be a bit cruel - so I probably won't. I aspire to becoming competent at communicating in the language (but I've got to get through the gismu and cmavo first). mu'o mi'e greg.daik.