Subject: Re: lessons deadline

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 14:56:25 +1000

cu'u la robin.

>I don't understand the above. What sample texts? What's a chrestomathy
>again?

Ok, some presumptions of things mumbled by me and others much 
earlier. I do this presuming a lot; thank you Robin for calling me on 
it (here and elsewhere :-)

A chrestomathy is an anthology used for didactic purposes. One of the 
foundational books of Esperanto, published a couple of decades after 
the language (and coinciding with the first Congress) was the 
_Fundamenta Krestomatio_: an anthology of Esperanto writing to date, 
used for instructive purposes. A chrestomathy has long been talked 
about as being part of the eventual baseline: if we have a sampler of 
good Lojban writings, we prove that it's a real language --- and 
that's when the baseline should start.

The point may be moot now, it may not; there's long been confusion 
on what should go into the baseline, after all. But (on a possibly 
related note) someone has told me it would be good if the lessons 
contained short practice reading passages, over and above the little 
translation exercises. Where the translation exercises are 
artificial, silly, and geared to a limited vocab & grammar, the 
reading passages would be found text from a variety of sources (JL, 
mailing lists, wiki, IRC, cvs, wherever Lojban is used); with free 
vocab, but with basically only the grammar discussed up to that 
point. It would have the same pedagogical intent as the chrestomathy: 
to illustrate to people Lojban as she is actually spoke.

What I'm saying is, I want to do this. But I don't think I'll get the 
time to do it in the next two weeks. And because there is now a 
prospect that the Level 0 might need to take priority (so we can use 
it as a trial baloon for Print On Delivery), I'm wondering if I 
shouldn't extend the deadline on myself for finishing it to the end 
of October. Opinions welcome.
-- 
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* Dr Nick Nicholas, Linguistics/French & Italian [email-masked] *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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