Lojban In General

Here is another (rather misguided) review:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/15/RV7J17I5FA.DTL

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 23:30, komfo,amonan <komfoamonan@gmail.com> wrote:
> coi ro do
> Those of you who attended the 2006 Logfest at Philcon may remember
> Arika Okrent, a linguist who was researching conlangs for a book.
> Well, the book appears today
> http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Esperanto-Dreamers/dp/0385527888/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242764829&sr=1-2
>
> & has already been reviewed by Language Hat
> http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003501.php
>
> mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan
>
>
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> with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
> you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.
>
>

--
Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>
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Posted by lojbab on Mon 23 of Nov, 2009 11:25 GMT posts: 162

Adam Raizen wrote:
> Here is another (rather misguided) review:
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/15/RV7J17I5FA.DTL
>
> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 23:30, komfo,amonan <komfoamonan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>coi ro do
>>Those of you who attended the 2006 Logfest at Philcon may remember
>>Arika Okrent, a linguist who was researching conlangs for a book.
>>Well, the book appears today
>>http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Esperanto-Dreamers/dp/0385527888/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242764829&sr=1-2
>>
>>& has already been reviewed by Language Hat
>>http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003501.php

Arika sent me a complimentary advance copy of the book last week, and
Nora and I have gone through the section on "Logical Languages" - about
55 pages mostly about Loglan/Lojban, with side notes on Blissymbolics,
Laadan, and maybe a couple of others.

Those who were at the 2006 Philcon will recognize her description of
that farce. Given the circumstances, I think her presentation was quite
fair, and she got the pre-1990 history of the project down about as
correctly as I think could be expected (she doesn't much talk about what
has happened since then, but this may be in part because we haven't been
putting out publications that document the ongoing project history); I
wish she had mentioned more names besides Nora and mine among the key
early Lojbanists.

My main disagreement is that she took away from Philcon the impression
that Lojban is harder to learn and to speak than it really is. She
holds up the results of our ad hoc conversation efforts - all by self
taught students who seldom have opportunities to speak the language,
many of whom have no especial talent for languages in the first place.
She also mentioned our discussion of a complex and abstract
philosophical statement that she had tried to translate for herself.

In my own email response to her, I noted that if you stuck a bunch of
self-taught Russian students in a room, all of them at the 1st or 2nd
year skill level, who don't know each other and have few interests in
common other than the Russian that they have studied, and asked them to
hold a conversation, sans dictionary, you would probably get no better
results. And if you asked them ad hoc to translate an abstract
philosophical statement about language under those conditions, they
would have gotten nowhere at all.

But even though I disagree with her conclusion, her observations are
honest and reasonable, and her writing style is light and entertaining,
knowledgeable, but not heavy in academese. I highly recommend the book
to Lojbanists, and especially those interested in a variety of conlangs.

lojbab

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