Subject: Re: New to lojban, any suggestions?

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 16:33:34 -0700

Steven Fodstad asked:

>As an aside--in the previous paragraph, I explicitly numbered the items.
>Is there a similar facility in Lojban?

-mai for sentences, -mo'o for text divisions. Your example involves parts
of sentences, and I'm going to assume it's legitimate to extend -mai to
them. Thus:

>I started to keep a journal in Lojban, but it's been slow going because
>a) I've never written a journal before, b)I have an extremely small
>vocabulary, and c) I am learning to use Emacs at the same time.(Thank
>you, Gnu people, for the Alt+1,Alt+Shift+1 shortcut)

.i mi co'a vrejygau lo sezykarni pebau la lojban. .i ku'i lenu go'i cu
masno ki'u lenu pamai mi punai vrejygau lo sezykarni kei .e lenu remai le'i
valsi poi slabu mi cu cmalu kei .e lenu cimai mi ca ji'a cilre lenu pilno
la .emaks. (to ki'e prenu pe la gnus. zi'epoi finti le batkyci'a tordunli
po'u .alt.bu joi pabu ce'o .alt.bu joi taubu joi pabu toi)

Note: Shift is taubu, Caps Lock is ga'ebu. I hope I'm not insane enough to
come up with equivalents of the other keys of the keyboard...

Emacs. Lordy. While I had to use Emacs, I was using vim-mode as much as
humanly possible, and as soon as I found a WYSIWYG XML editor, I dropped it
like a stone. I admire your perseverence...

>I like Lojban because I believe the hypothesis(you know the one. Can't
>remember the names that go along with it at the moment) is true, and if
>it's true, what more positive effects could come of it than of Lojban?

Sapir-Whorf. Haven't seen it mentioned here much lately. I think most
linguists hope it isn't true, for ideological reasons ("All languages are
equal")...

Nick Nicholas, TLG, UCI, USA. [email-masked] www.opoudjis.net
"Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives
correctly; some of them were right." --- Harry Turtledove.