Subject: Re: [lojban] slashdot.org gives Lojban a push

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 04:54:57 -0400

At 09:42 AM 05/04/2000 +0200, Daniel Gudlat wrote:
>la lojbab. cusku di'e
> > >Hmm, we may finally get a truly international audience on the list. This
> > >may prove interesting. Three cheers to slashdot if it really happens!
> >
> > We already have a quite international audience. Take a look sometime. Our
> > most frequent poster is Jorge from Argentina. Chris from New Zealand just
> > responded on this thread. I think something like 30-40% of list
> > subscribers are known to be non-US people
>
>Hmm, and how many of those still have English as their native language?

I'll do a count next time I look at the subscription list.

>Also, I'm learning lojban via English, and usually translate lojban into
>English instead of my native German, which doesn't help the issue
>either. I guess I'd like to see a lot of the lojban learning material
>available in all the gismu source languages as well as other languages,
>especially French and German, so we can offer native stuff to as many
>prospective lojban learners as possible.

Wouldn't we all. Esperanto is a reasonable priority too since we have many 
Esperantists and it would reach people already interested in artificial 
languages.

> Once I have a better command of
>lojban I intend to translate some of the stuff into German, or is
>someone already doing so? If so speak up, please!

So far as I know, there are no translation effort for any of the learning 
materials into any language except possibly Russian (Evguenie 
Sklyanin). There have been versions of the gismu list prepared in several 
languages, but most of them are only at the keyword level (i.e. like 
LogFlash) and hence only a starting point for a real translation. Place 
structure translation takes a bit of work, as would listing synonyms; again 
Evguenie is working on a Russian gismu list that is a complete translation.

> Btw, Is there an easy
>way to "localize" the logflash programs?

LogFlash can easily support other languages and was designed for it, so 
long as the keywords are unique and less than 20 characters long. There is 
support for some diacritics such as the umlaut, entered by typing two 
characters. If someone were to prepare a list with German or other Roman 
alphabet keywords, it is a 5 minute job to prepare a LogFlash file. We 
have also used LogFlash with Cyrillic, but not using the standard Russian 
keyboard/character sets.

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 (newly updated!)