Are you a newbie and ready for your first read? Are you more experienced and would like to take on the challenge of introducing your children to a story in Lojban? Either way, you'll want to take a look at a new translation by Remo Dentato of If I had a Pet Dinasaur by Gil Robles.
It's in full colour, nicely illustrated and a wonderful quick read!
Today, Jan Szejko (ianek) gave a short presentation on Lojban to students at the renowned Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw in Poland. Students from this faculty have twice won first place at the world finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
A mind map of Lojban word types has been made available on the cheat sheet page of this website. This should be a particularly useful learning aid for beginners with strong visual memory.
Check out the Learning page for more information on how to start learning Lojban.
The 2010 Annual Meeting of the Logical Language Group Inc. has closed. Bob LeChevalier (USA), Arnt Johansen (Norway) and Robin Powell (USA) were re-elected to the Board. They are joined by two new members: Timo Paulssen (Germany) and Veijo Vilva (Finland).
Yesterday Willem Larsen, one of the creators of the language fluency game "Where are your Keys?, published a blog entry called "The Playful World of Conlangs" to the "Where are your Keys? blog.
Lojban is given special mention as one of the constructed languages which has a "Where are your Keys?" community.
Alan Post has announced that "lo do ckiku ma zvati("Where are your Keys?") can now be played by e-mail.
"Where are your Keys?" is a language fluency game that is quickly gaining in popularity among Lojban neophytes. In it's initial version, it was played interactively - requiring students to be available at the same time.
The e-mail version will make it easier for students in different time zones to participate.
If you are interested in playing, please join the group.
Starting today, Polish lojbanists have their own mailing list lojban-pl. The Polish group is currently deciding which Lojban resources to translate into Polish first. Marek Rogalski is the contact.
Poland is expected to be fertile ground for Lojban, having a great tradition in the field of constructed languages. Ludwik (Leyzer) Zamenhoff, the creator of Esperanto, was born in Bialystok in 1859.
A new children's book le lunra jo'u le mapku is available. This is a translation by Remo Dentato of The Moon and the Cap, written in India.
This full colour PDF-format book looks just like the original, and will be a great way to introduce your children to the joys of Lojban.
Leo Molas will give a presentation on Lojban at the upcoming "Jornadas del Sur" convention on Monday, August 16, in Bahia Blanca, Argentina.
The subject of the convention, which lasts from Saturday, August 14 to Monday, August 16, is free software and free culture.
Leo's presentation will cover:
-What is Lojban?
-History
-Sapir-Whorf Hyphothesis
-Why learn Lojban?
-Basic grammar
For more information, contact Leo.
The 2010 Annual Meeting of the Logical Language Group Inc, will commence on 21 August 2010 at approximately 1PM EDT, on the llg-members list. The meeting will be conducted by email. Members should be checking their members list email at least daily.
Non-members who may be interested in becoming formal members of LLG should also attend. Please read the bylaws of the LLG in advance of the meeting, and perhaps a few of the minutes of prior meetings, so that you have some idea what membership is all about; the LLG typically accepts anyone who shows evidence of sufficient interest and awareness of what they are signing up for.
To get access privileges to the llg-members list, non-members should contact LLG Secretary Robin Powell, preferably on IRC Chat.
Starting July 27, 2010, Lojban enthusiasts in the San Francisco area of the USA will meet together at regular intervals each month to communicate in and about Lojban. The venue is the home of Stephen Weeks in Mountainview.
The format and content of these meetings will be set during the first meetings. The seriously curious as well as experienced lojbanists are welcome. Contact Stephen if you are interested in particpating.
A new milestone has been reached with the implementation of over 600 Lojban's structure words ('cmavo') on Smart.fm. Now, the whole of Lojban's basic vocabulary of root words, their conversions and structure words can be studied using one of the most effective learning tools currently available.
Smart.fm is an adaptive flashcard system that includes audio, advanced tracking features based on a unique learning algorithm, and provides an applet for the iPhone.
To take a look, go to the site, type 'Lojban' in the Search box, sign-up and start learing!
Lojbanists Jorge Llambias and Leo Molas have proposed complete sets of Lojban words for all countries, languages and currencies, basing them on ISO codes. A systematic approach to the use of these codes has enabled a virtually automatic process for producing such words - one likely to work for future, as yet unspecified
codes.
The sets can be found at http://bit.ly/bgB7PV, http://bit.ly/9Ma7Qq, http://bit.ly/clUVtb and http://bit.ly/c43ua5.
Lojban words derived from foreign words or external
sources are known as 'fu'ivla'. The proposal is a
solution to a problem that all constructed languages
share. How do you go about efficiently translating tens
of thousands of words that have evolved in natural
languages over thousands of years within the
constraints imposed by your own language rule?'.
All of Lojban's approximately 1300 'gismu' (root-words), along with their 'rafsi' (short versions of the root-words) are now implemented in the Quizlet flashcard memorization website. Grouped alphabetically in 28 sets, they bring the total of Lojban word sets to 169. This huge selection of sets, grouped in so many different ways, significantly facilitates vocabulary learning.
By comparison, Esperanto has 274 sets, Interlingua 22, Toki Pona 22, Ido 18, Klingon 10.
{DIV(float=>right)}{IMG(attId="707",thumb="browse" height=100)}{DIV}Logfest 2010 took place from April 30 - May 2 at PenguiCon 2010 in Troy, Michigan, and was a great success. Nine serious Lojbanists attended, and we attracted 3 or 4 newbies. Courtesy of Axis, here is a picture of most of the attendees, and a couple of newbies, attending a lesson.
The popular children's story book The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight has been translated into Lojban by Andrew Piekarski and reviewed by Michael Turiansky. It can be listened to (download totus reads The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight) as well as read.
For devotees of exotic scripts, a Tengwar version is available (download 'lo la BERenstain. cribe co'a simda'a' written in Tengwar).
Michael Turiansky did the first translation of one of the Berenstain Bears series - The Berenstain Bears and the Prize Pumpkin.
The Lojban community's annual convention, Logfest (known in Lojban as jbonunsla), will be held during April 30 - May 2 this year at Penguicon 2010 in Troy, Michigan in the USA. Experienced lojbanists who want to talk in Lojban, newbies who want to meet some of the key people in the community, and anybody who is just interested are all invited to attend what promises to be a mind-blowing experience. For more information contact Matt Arnold.
The first stage of implementing Lojban vocabulary on Smart.fm has been completed. All 1300 of Lojban's root words ('gismu') can now be studied along with some 3,500 derived words ('gismu sumti'). These are organized into 'lessons', three of which are now ready. Additional lessons for learning over 600 structure words ('cmavo') are now in development.
Smart.fm is an adaptive flashcard learning tool that includes audio, advanced tracking features based on a unique learning algorithm, and provides an applet for the iPhone.
To take a look, go to the site, type 'Lojban' in the Search box, sign-up and start learing!
Students at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have started a Lojban Society. Hosting weekly meetings in a local pub, the group has 12 members after its first month. The group is to provide a social environment for people sharing an interest in Lojban and, in the future, act as a resource for Lojban-related projects at the University. Certainly repeatable at any university (or anywhere for that matter!). To find out more, contact lojban@st-andrews.ac.uk.
"Where are your Keys?" is a language fluency game that rapidly builds fluency in a language by making the techniques used to teach language transparent to the student so they can be used for self-directed learning. A "Where are your Keys?" website focused specifically toward learning Lojban is now online: "lo do ckiku ma zvati". Come and play "lo do ckiku ma zvati!" Contact Alan Post for more information.
An invitation has been made by an author on The Sporum, the official Spore forum, for a discussion about Lojban. If you have an opinion to share with others, go for it! Spore is a popular multi-genre single-player metaverse god game published by Electronic Arts. The forum has a Science and Spore section for participants who are science buffs.
Work has started on making Smart.fm available to students of Lojban vocabulary. At its core, Smart.fm is an adaptive flashcard learning tool but with audio and advanced tracking features. A review can be found here. Beginners will find learning lojban vocabulary using Smart.fm fun and fast! If you already have a basic knowledge of lojban pronunciation and know how gismu work, and would like to contribute to this project, contact Jon "Top Hat" Jones.
Today, BBC Radio 4 aired another episode of its Word of Mouth program. Lojban was discussed along with Esperanto, Láadan and Klingon. To listen to it, download BBC program on constructed languages.
The Complete Lojban Language by John Woldemar Cowan is now available to buy from Amazon.com, and just in time for the holiday season. Treat yourself or someone special!
jbotcan, the lojbanic channel, is back up. It features anonymous imageboards, an rss feed that collects news from all over and more goodies! Be sure to check it out!
Today, Timo and Cizra released their animation short lai citno melbi pinpedi. You can watch it on Google Video now! If that title sounds familiar, you may have seen this comic strip before.
In other news, the same Timo has been busy creating Jbobac, a Lojbanic audio board that anyone can post to. Just point your browser to http://jbobac.lojban.org/, and join the action!
Welcome, xkcd readers! Join some Lojbanic Forums. The Lojban-speaking community loves xkcd, so getting xkcd'ed is as good as getting Slashdotted, Dugg or Farked. The author of xkcd is expressing a sentiment similar to Groucho Marx's statement, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." We can definitely laugh at ourselves, and exposure to xkcd's target audience (math, linguistics, and sarcasm) will probably result in at least one more participant in our hobby.
Today I'm going to send in the Lojban group registration for Philcon. Email me your name and address and PayPal your registration now. I mean right now!
Only one week left to get in on the Lojban group's discount rate to register for Philcon in Philadelphia, the science fiction convention where the annual Lojban Festival will be held on November 17 through 19. See jbonunsla 2006 for details, including our stellar Lojbanic guest list and schedule of events. We now have two rooms to put you up in if your expenses are tight. You can still register after we send in the group registration, but it will cost more. It might be the most fun Lojbanic meeting ever. I'm serious, now is the time to get in on this! -Eppcott
The Lojban community blog on Livejournal is now embedded on the Lojban homepage, as part of the plan discussed in Friday's entry. Prepare for a digest of all the Lojbanic goodness the web has to offer! You don't have to have a Livejournal account to subscribe to the web feed. You do need an LJ account to post, but if you don't want to get an LJ account you can just send your contribution to Matt Arnold who will post it to the blog for you.
Lojban was mentioned in an article in the Wall Street Journal, "How Hartmut Pilch, Avid Computer Geek, Bested Microsoft",
by Mary Jacoby. The free sample text made available online reads as follows:
A 43-year-old linguist from Munich, Mr. Pilch speaks Chinese, Japanese and an artificial language called Lojban intended to eliminate ambiguity and promoted by some programmers. He is the unlikely leader of a movement of self-styled computer geeks out to sink a patents plan they say would stifle software programmers.
The next Lojban Fest for 2006 will be held at Philcon in Philadelphia, November 17 through 19, 2006. Check out the page jbonunsla 2006 for the schedule and attendees so far, as well as registration details. Newcomers are especially welcome to join us! Keep checking the schedule as we continue to work with the Klingon Language Institute about the possibility of collaborative content between Lojban and Klingon at Philcon!
Have you visited the land where Lojban is spoken? It's called samxarmuj, meaning "computerized imaginary universe". It's a text-based world on the internet, where you can operate a character using commands in either English or Lojban: the online software is bilingual. Lojban is like the language of magic in samxarmuj--speaking it can bring objects into existence and give them form and function.
You don't even need a plane ticket. Just click here and use the password "moo" to log in as a guest until you have your own account. Commands are typed in the bottom-most part of the window. Guest accounts are limited to using English, so type the "register" command to get your own account. It's totally free.
More information, including other ways to access samxarmuj, is available at the wiki page about The Lojban MOO.
Intense labor on the part of many skilled programmers in our community has brought forth one of the most exciting venues in which to use Lojban that this language has ever had. Today, the software leaves Beta. It is with bated breath that we launch this massively multiplayer system and declare it ready for the public. But now we need to massively populate it.
We are currently summoning new mages of every skill level. Come build your own part of the land. Although you do not have to speak Lojban to adventure in the land as it forms out of the nothingness around us,
all spells must be cast in correct Lojban. Whatever power hears our descriptions of samxarmuj, and turns them into reality, will respond to no other language.
This land also welcome tourists with no skill in Lojban at all. Feel free to ask us any question about how to use the system. With enough interest, we may even be able to establish the Lojbanic equivalent of
a Hogwarts academy for novice Lojban magicians! Who knows? Welcome to samxarmuj! Go native!
jbonunsla 2006 was held at Penguicon in Michigan, April 21-23 2006. Next up for jbonunsla 2006 will be Philcon 2006 in November!
jbonunsla 2006, a celebration of the Logical Language, will be held at the science fiction convention and open source software expo Penguicon in Michigan, April 21-23 2006. This does not exclude others hosting LogFests of their own in 2006.
Logfest was held at PhilCon in Philadelphia from December 9th to December 11th. It was a quite successful event, despite a turnout that was a bit lower than expected. More details in the page about Logfest 2005.
As the Secretary, I apologize for the lateness of this announcement,
but I only got full confirmation 10 days ago myself.
Philcon - The Philadelphia Conference of Science Fiction and Fantasy has agreed to have a room set aside
for LogFest 2005!
Philcon 2005 is being held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
on December 9th-11th, 2005. That's IN 26 DAYS!
I know that's really, really short notice, but if we can get enough
people to show up, they'll do it for us next year too, and hopefully
that relationship will continue far into the future.
People showing up for LogFest will have to buy PhilCon
memberships. Please let me know if that, or any other aspect of
these arrangements, provides an unacceptable financial burden to
you. I, and others, are willing to help put up some money for
active Lojbanists who want to come.
We don't know how big the room is going to be yet, but I've told
them we expect about 10 people.
Complete site overhaul! Most of the lojban.org content has been
moved from a set of static HTML pages to a
TikiWiki content management system. The
number of changes caused by this are too long to list. In addition,
the LLG 2004 Annual Meeting Minutes have been posted.
A variety of minor bug fixes were done on the site, as well as some
more major items. The front page was returned to CSS, XHTML and
Bobby Level 3 compliance. The problem with clicking on one of the
maps causing the maps to stop functioning was fixed. A couple of
one-sheet brochures were added to the
brochures page. The 25 November 2002 Board Meeting minutes were
added. The 2003 annual meeting minutes were added.
What is Lojban? is now available for purchase! The lojban.org site is now available, at least partially, in a
variety of different languages. The vast majority of the site has
been marked up in a way to make easy translation possible, but not
all of the actual translation has been done. If you want to help,
please contact the webmaster. Also, there is now a web-based IRC
client available on the Forums page. The French and Spanish Lojban
lists are now available. A Lojbanic translation program has been
installed.
Some bylaw changes from 1992 were incorporated. Split off
of Old Projects into a seperate page, many changes (mostly minor) to
the projects and committees pages. Markup changes all over the
place.
The full changes list can be found at the
Aegis change page for change number 144.
This is the first site update in a long time, and as such it's a big
one. The site now has Request Tracker set up,
and that is being used to manage necessary changes. The Level 0
book was added to the main site, a Helping Lojban page, a Help page,
and a Feedback page were all added, and jbovlaste and Request
Tracker were both linked in.
An IRC logging system has been set up. See the Lojbanic Forums page. Also, many
pages have been edited to point to wiki.lojban.org as the official wiki
site, which will continue to be the right place even if someone else
takes it over.
The new Official Baseline Statement,
from the LLG has been posted.
Addition to the Official Projects Page,
minor fixes and updates.
A Promotional Materials page
has been created. Also, I've made a Community Files
Area, which is a TWiki (a web-based colloborative space).
The Lojban FAQ has been updated and
moved and revamped and such. .uisai Thanks go to Dalton Graham for doing
most of the work.
There has been a major revamp of the Resources section. It has a lot
more information in it now.
The old minutes of the LLG have been posted, thanks to Jay Kominek. He also html
formatted the bylaws. See the LLG
publications page.
The official LLG Projects page has been
constructed. Please submit anything you are working on!
An official LLG Committees page has
also been added.
An interactive
story has been added; see the original
lojbanic texts page.
As may be obvious, I just made some drastic changes to the layout of
the site. Please let me
(webmaster@lojban.org)
know what you think!
LogFest, the annual gathering of lojbanists, is this coming weekend.
Also, the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Members of the LLG will be held
on Sunday, July 28th (during LogFest).
The 2002 Annual Meeting of the Members of the LLG will be held at
1030AM EDT on Sunday July 28, 2002 at lojbab's house, 2904 Beau
Lane, Fairfax VA 22031 USA. There being insufficient notice as
required, no bylaw changes can be considered.
LogFest mostly consists of a bunch of people hanging out at lojbab's
house, talking in and about lojban. The annual meeting always
occurs during LogFest.
There was a major (several day) downtime of this site, due to bad
RAM, which in turn caused file system corruption. The problem has
been solved, and this machine now has a new, larger hard drive, as
well as a completely new operating system (NetBSD 1.5.2).
In addition, since the last update this machine has gotten a much
faster processor and been moved into a co-location facility with a
connection to the internet that is close to 300Mb/s.
Minor website updates have been made. In particular, the contents
of the Learning Lojban sections have been slightly improved, and
many relative links have been fixed.
Amazing news! The first draft of the Alice In Wonderland
translation appears to be complete. The only things missing are a
couple of the chapter titles and one stanza of a poem, as of this
writing. Please go take a look in the Translations section!