General considerations

1. Lojban terms are used for most parts of speech, except for quantifiers and descriptors. Needlessly inconsistent?
2. It would be better if formal definitions were separated from comments, and not going mixed.
3. It would be better if numbered were not only chapters and sections, but also sentences like in the Bible.
   • Exactly what would be the benefit of adding "verse" numbers? We can easily cite specific sentences without the need to do this. For example, citing from the online refgram: 9.3.7.2 (Chapter 9, section 3, paragraph 7, sentence 2): "Therefore, it is perfectly all right to scramble...." Or for examples: 9.3-3.3 (Chapter 9, section 3, example 3.3): "3.3) klama fa mi fi la .atlantas. ...." mi'e.aionys.
4. There should be more illustration and diagrams. For instance, with termsets, show with lines and/or colour coding how two sentences are equivalent. See The Japanese Wikipedia for some other examples.
5. Chapter 4 needs to go somewhere else, ideally near the end. It's crazy to give all that crap to newbies.
6. All the tables should be made into proper HTML tables so that the table cells don't bleed into each other.

Typographical

The brush-stroke placeholders for logical connectives should be written in "blackboard bold" instead, to make it look more form

• I remember this section being confusing to me because of the brushstroke letters. Suddenly the book became much more formal (in the mathematical sense) and I didn't know what that signified. Writing them as of "-a -e -i -o" might be better, since the hyphen indicates they are not themselves words, without introducing a strange new typographical convention. The book already uses hyphens to show that rafsi are not words, so this would be consistent. Or since "a e i o" actually are words, perhaps they could be used directly. mi'e.paldanyli.

Per section

Chapter 3

Section 6

1. Section 6, restriction no. 2 already forbids 8 of the 12 consonant pairs that are forbidden by restriction no. 3; perhaps it's better to just explicitly forbid the pairs "cs", "jz", "sc" and "zj" like in the last restriction.
   • I kind of like that the explanation for those pairs being forbidden is given, even if it includes things already forbidden. I would like it slightly better if the word "sibilant" were used. Perhaps for consistency the reason could be given for the last restriction instead of listing seemingly-random pairs. .imi'e .skaryzgik.
     • Agreed mi'e.aionys.

Section 9

1. A bit after example 9.5, the explanation of how to stress words is ambiguous. A possible incorrect interpretation:

   set stressed_syllable = penultimate_syllable
   while (stressed_syllable contains "l|m|n|r|y")
       if (stressed_syllable != first_syllable)
           stressed_syllable = syllable_before(stressed_syllable)

   None of the examples demonstrate that only syllables containing "l|m|n|r" as syllables on their own are to be skipped, nor that skipped syllables are to be ignored before you start counting as opposed to skipped while you're counting. The following examples would make it clearer: {djanatyn} is pronounced {DJAnatyn} (not {djaNAtyn}), and {patrica} is pronounced {paTRIca} (not {PAtrica}).

Section 12

• The tengwar table should use actual tengwar in addition to their names, since we now have Unicode (CSUR) and good fonts.

Chapter 4

Section 7

• In the procedure for making a non-Lojban word into a valid Stage 3 fu'ivla, double consonants are to be eliminated before the sounds are to be converted to their closest Lojban equivalents, but it is possible that consecutive consonants have different sounds (like in 'eccentric'). So these actions should swap places. The same goes for section 8, in the procedure for Lojbanizing a name.

Chapter 10

• It would be nice if there was a template for compound tenses around the end of the chapter, like the template for compound cnima'o in chapter 13 section 8. In fact, xorxes has already made one.

Chapter 16

Section 9

• It says "for no x" (noda) is the same as "it is false for some x" (naku su'oda). I (mi'e zort) interpret "it is false for some x" as "there is an x such that it is false" (su'oda naku), not "it is false that for some x it is true" (naku su'oda), so it should be changed to "it is false that for some x".

fd