Lojban In General

Posted by lojbab on Mon 16 of Jun, 2008 06:01 GMT posts: 162

MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com wrote:
> In a message dated 4/13/2008 04:22:13 AM Central Daylight Time,
> ecartis@digitalkingdom.org writes:
>
>> My wife helped me find and dig out the great Tome of Etymology from
>> where it was buried. I spent a few minutes comparing what you had with
>> what was in the book, and had no complaints about the dozen odd words I
>> looked up.
>>
>> Alas, a serious effort to use the book to solve your problems will take
>> much time. The hundreds of sheets are not ordered in any way and are
>> not indexed. There are 4 words to the typical page in no particular
>> order, and thus the pages couldn't be ordered if I wanted to. The only
>> way I will find the missing and problem words is pretty much to go
>> through a page at a time.
>>
>> I still have the Russian dictionary we used for the original work as
>> well.
>>
>> I'll see if I can make an effort on it in the next week or two.
>>
>> lojbab
>
> How much trouble would it be to photograph or scan all those pages and
> post them on a site or email them? Or mail the whole thing? How hard
> is it to read the handwriting?
> I'm offering to type the whole thing if it's deemed worthy of the effort.

I estimate 400 pages 8 1/2 x 11, possibly as many as 500.

A good number of them have notes on the back, usually regarding the
Chinese (where I listed several possibilities from the
English-to-Chinese side of the dictionary, and then checked all of them
in the Chinese to English dictionary to determine which were legitimate
translations, and which were other meanings of the English words, or
metaphors too far removed from the desired sense. This was my practice
with the other language I researched, Russian, but I seldom needed any
notes for the Russian. Nora and Tommy Whitlock, who researched the other
languages, did not make many notes.)

I think the handwriting (printing) is easy to read, but then it is
mostly my handwriting %^).

We have a scanner, but my efficiency in using it is at the level of
minutes per image (I have thousands of unscanned photos waiting too). I
could consider photography, which I've used for similar problems in
storing genealogical documents, but 800 images could run upwards of half
a gig. Small change on a hard disk these days, but someone would have
to provide a website and instructions (I'm still back in the 80s when it
comes to putting stuff on a website and over 10 Meg was a large site,
and I never send more than 2 megabytes in an email). I could burn a DVD
and snailmail it as well. None of this is possible this month, but I
can imagine doing the photo solution without taking years to get around
to it.

Whether it is worthy of the effort, I leave to someone else to
determine. I once started to create an etymology database using dBase
(which is what we were using back then for all the Lojban work), but I
didn't get very far because relative few people were interested once the
words were made. And of course the inclusion of non-definitional
English keywords in addition to definitions has been under attack all
along; the etymology is necessarily built on using non-English keywords
which at best are likely to be less satisfactory than the English ones,
because they were selected by non-speakers of the languages in question.
Suffice it to say that I probably went for 10 years without looking up
a single word in the book.

If we had native speakers of the other languages using LogFlash (with
the foreign keywords) or some similarly instrumented learning program to
measure the value of the keywords as learning aids, I would find that an
interesting use of the data. But LogFlash is deemed old-fashioned by
Lojbanists. I have a small number of data dumps from English learners
that I never have gotten to analyzing.

lojbab

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Posted by stevo on Mon 16 of Jun, 2008 06:02 GMT posts: 381

In a message dated 4/13/2008 04:22:13 AM Central Daylight Time,
ecartis@digitalkingdom.org writes:

> My wife helped me find and dig out the great Tome of Etymology from
> where it was buried. I spent a few minutes comparing what you had with
> what was in the book, and had no complaints about the dozen odd words I
> looked up.
>
> Alas, a serious effort to use the book to solve your problems will take
> much time. The hundreds of sheets are not ordered in any way and are
> not indexed. There are 4 words to the typical page in no particular
> order, and thus the pages couldn't be ordered if I wanted to. The only
> way I will find the missing and problem words is pretty much to go
> through a page at a time.
>
> I still have the Russian dictionary we used for the original work as well.
>
> I'll see if I can make an effort on it in the next week or two.
>
> lojbab
>

How much trouble would it be to photograph or scan all those pages and post
them on a site or email them? Or mail the whole thing? How hard is it to read
the handwriting?
I'm offering to type the whole thing if it's deemed worthy of the effort.

stevo </HTML>