Subject: Re: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 13:09:56 -0400 (EDT)

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, G. Dyke wrote:

> 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]

No flames at all! Welcome aboard! Glad to have you on.

> 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?

Well, let me see what I can do.

fiat is an English word, it means when a lord declares something to be so,
and so it is. It means a decision made by authority without any
discussion, debate, or recourse.

"glork" is some word from a sci fi novel that seems to mean "to understand
on an intuitive level". I have NO clue what the odd construction
"glorkjunkied" means.

Elephant is a debate recording web system the John Cowan is working on. It
is supposed to help us by maintaining a permanent records of our debates,
because often the same issues are chewed annually and people are too lazy
to read the archives and realize it. It's not always their fault; a lot of
folks are too lazy to use clear and appropriate suject headers.

gumri is an old gismu that was rejected, which means "mushroom" or
"mushroom shape". You may not have the modem time to read the whole Wiki
but I'm sure you can read this one page:
<http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?Resurrected%20gismu>

I don't know what Nick means when he says Lojban will never succeed.
Although Nick is a supreme Lojbanist, some of his opinions, like his
hatred of rafsi, are his alone.

> 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...

Sorry. I'm xod! I think the only recourse is to ask, as you have.

> 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)

I hope you not only continue activity when school starts, but are also
blessed with better net access, so you can create your own page on the
Wiki and stick this info there too!

> 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.

-----
A Nationalist is a Globalist who's city has been bombed.