Subject: Re: Speaking Lojban

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 02:31:58 -0700 (PDT)

--- In lojban@y..., Invent Yourself <xod@s...> wrote:
> Nora also spoke only Lojban at at Logfest, using English only where her
> hostess and Secretary duties forced her to speak to the jbonalka'e.

.i ca co'a cizra li'i mi fa lenu viska lenu do pilno le glico .u'i

Nora was also stuck with the {jboplinaldji}, namely me. It's quite easy
for me (as you'll have heard, xod!) to sputter out three or four sentences
in Lojban, and then to give up and go back to English; because Nora didn't
have your Iron Will (heheh), I probably seduced her back to the dark side
once too often...

> It hurt my head, but my intuitive knowledge tripled! I think Nora & I
were
> at about the same level but Nick was still ahead of us both, speaking so
> quickly that I often could not comprehend the sentences.

Let the record show, however, that Olivia did amazingly well in
comprehension; in fact, she ended up interpreting between us more than
once. :-)

> Robin Powell kept
> up very well, especially considering that it was his first Logfest.

And if I got to talk to him for any extended period of time, I would have
found that out... I'll be over s00n enuff, d00d!

> A
> great deal of my extended conversation with Nick occurred away from
> Logfest when we went at ate dinner at an Ethiopian spot in DC.

.i mi rapli ckire do .e la .olivian. lenu stidi lenu citka vi le
kulnrnetiopia gusta .i le cijda .e ra'u le cakla kruji cu xagycai .i je
li'a lenu ci mi simta'a cu carmi zdile va'o ku .i ku'i zu'unai
le bisli kruji poi mi na ka'e citka vi la xavdei ki'u lenu vitke zi'e poi
mi citka ca la pavdei cu cmonyri'a xamgu

Arguing is difficult enough for me in person (as opposed to behind the
curtain of internet anonymity), and even more so in Lojban; I think it
pretty cool that we did achieve some sort of consensus in the end on the
Great Issues Of The Day...

> All of us were stumbling along with a literary style of Lojban,
> over-formal and over-complex, that would never be applied in
> conversation.

*shrug* I've never liked attitudinals, I don't think they're the point of
Lojban, and you'll have noticed I mostly avoided them (whereas I made a
point of using {kei} as much as I could. :-) .) To then hear that Mark
dislikes lujvo... we may yet have disdialektigho (the bugbear of
Esperanto: splitting into dialects).

Oh well. I've got to say, with the exception of the one time I encountered
more of a whirlwind than myself :-) (Goran), talking faster than anyone
else in Lojban does tend to make me default back to English. I honestly
can't speak any slower, because then I forget what I was saying! But full
kudos to xod, who displayed much more perseverance than I would ever dream
of, and who did not slip up even once in a confirmable manner --- with the
possible exception of matters of dire emergency. :-)

And oh yeah. Lojban is hard. Hard enough for me to entertain John Cowan
while discoursing to Nora, with the rictus that was forming around my
lips...

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
[email-masked] -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias