Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Le Petit Prince: Can we legally translate it?

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 13:32:31 -0400

At 12:10 PM 9/13/02 +0200, Lionel Vidal wrote:
> >We could always translate linguistics, something we are used to doing
> >%^) Comrie, who has interest in constructed languages, would seem a person
> >likely to give permission to translate, perhaps especially his Typology
> >book which was germinal in my early Lojban design effort.
>
>Not so far from linguistic and rather recently published is the CCL : at
>least here is a recent book whose copyright problems could surely be
>dealt with :-)

CLL I presume you mean. Certainly it would be easier to translate Cowan's 
prose into Lojban than that of most philosophers, and I think it would be a 
lot easier than the Lojban-only dictionary

>More seriously, IMHO there is nothing like a well-written grammar book in
>the very language it describes to motivate and help a devoted student.

I dunno. I would mostly be motivated to read something in Lojban that was 
not easily locatable in English. Something written in Lojban, with the 
current level of skill of most writers, would be as likely to confuse as to 
enlighten.

>Besides, many will see it as a kind of indirect proof of that language
>expressive possibilities.

I should think that we've proven that a long time ago. The problem is not 
expressivity, but skill of the expressor and understandability on the part 
of the unskilled reader, especially since Lojban more than other artificial 
languages tends to attract people who are not necessarily all that skilled 
at learning or speaking foreign languages.

>Anyway, don't you think it would be quite a challenge to explain lojban
>notions like brivla or selbri or the tense system intricacies in lojban :-)

If we can explain it in English, we can explain it in Lojban. But would 
anyone bother to understand when they can read and understand it more 
easily in English.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org