old LLG Projects

The Lojbanic phone group is an idea Robin Lee Powell had a few months back after it became clear that the internet-based phone chat idea was just too much of a hurdle for most people to overcome; there were *way* too many technical problems to make it feasible, even for the professional computer geeks.

• Note added in 2004: IP phone seems to work much better now, see Skype.

So, my idea was that people should split up into pairs and call each other at mutually convenient times for chats in Lojban.

The overall goal being to establish a broad level of conversational fluency in the lojban community.

Phone Group Topics

A lot of people have expressed concern about the phone group with respect to the "well, what would we talk about?" issue. I'm pretty sure that discussions about that will take up a lot of space, so please see the Phone Group Topics page.

Nowadays, Story Time With Uncle Robin is a recurring topic.

Current Members

Name	E-Mail	Time	Skype ID	Expertise	#lojban Nickname
Robin Lee Powell	[email protected]	PST	rlpowell	Expert	rlpowell
Ark Balandin		GMT + 4	ark.balandin	Expert	.ark.balandin.
Jordan DeLong	[email protected]	CST
Pierre Abbat	[email protected]	EST		Beginner
Theodore Reed	[email protected]	PST	tedreed	Intermediate	bancus
Arnt Richard Johansen	arj tu'i bu nvg denpa bu org	CET		Intermediate	Broca
Steve Pomeroy	[email protected]	EST	?	Beginner	Xavier
xod	xod ne'i balvi pi'e org	EST		Intermediate/Expert
greg	[email protected]	CET	?	Beginner/Intermediate
Stephen Weeks	[email protected]	MST	srweeks	Intermediate	Tene
Philip Newton	[email protected]	CEST	?	Beginner
Matt Arnold	[email protected]	EST	matt_arnold	Beginner	Eppcott
Adam Lopresto	adam ne'i pubcrawler pi'e org	CDT	adamlopresto	Beginner/Intermediate
Kevin Reid	[email protected]	EDT	kpreid	Intermediate	kpreid
Yanis Batura	[email protected]	GMT +6	soyendo	Beginner	Yanis
Alex Martini	[email protected]	EST	amartini51	Beginner/Intermediate	aleks
Jonathan Strickland	[email protected]	EDT	?	Beginner/Intermediate	djanatyn
William McMillian		MDT	William McMillian	Beginner	Very_Bill
Remy Way	[email protected]	EST	rem.klajis	Beginner/Intermediate	remklajis
Gianmarco Molino	[email protected]	MDT	mercrutio.11235813	Beginner	mercrutio
Brett Williams	[email protected]	EST	selckiku	Expert	selckiku
Ashley P.	[email protected]	EST	kiriel.ambar	Beginner	eclen
?	[email protected]	GMT+2	mikkommm	Beginner	spfnym

Joining

We welcome anyone, regardless of expertise, physical location or monetary resources. If you can't speak much lojban, well, learning to understand others will help. If you can't afford to make long distance phone calls, one of the other members will be happy to call you. If that doesn't work, Robin Lee Powell'm willing to pony up calling card money just to get this going.

To join, just add people above to your skype friends' list and ask who might be available to talk with you.

In an ideal universe, Robin Lee Powell'd like to see people matched up with people of very different levels of ability, to spread the expertise around as quickly as possible, but I'm not hugely attached to that.

Lojban On The Phone

Please bear in mind, everyone, that collision avoidance is hard on the phone. Please become familiar with ta'a, re'i, be'e, je'e, ki'a and ke'o. Especially that last one.  :-)

Here's a phonetic alphabet for spelling words on the phone.

About Expertise

The "expertise" field in the members table is currently rather informal, and you are welcome to alter yours as you feel appropriate. However, Robin Lee Powell have had my expertise certified, as it were, by Nick Nicholas, in person. The reason I bothered, besides my ego, was that I want the option of making the phone group into a ranking system, similar to Chess rankings. In other words, if you want to be certified Expert level, you ask me or Nick to take some time to call you up and basically hammer away at you for an hour. You, in turn, can then certify people at rankings below Expert (or, possibly, at or below expert).

I doubt very much that it's necessary to say so, but please note that any use of word lists in any such tests would be cheating.

The infrastructure to do this is not in place, but I'd like people to keep it in mind as a future goal. Thanks to tsali's accidental suggestion, allow me to suggest that we will probably charge for the certification, all proceeds to the LLG of course.

Expertise Rankings

• Fluent: No concious thought required to speak in Lojban for any but the most complex conversations, and even then the mental work should not normally be about Lojbanic grammar or vocabulary. A good test for Fluency is whether you are able to engage in a complicated Lojban conversation whilst also doing something else, something that you could do at the same time as having a conversation in your native toungue.
• Expert: Able to engage in conversation in lojban with only minor and occasional pauses for thought.

• Intermediate: Comfortable with one of Lojban grammar or Lojban vocabulary, but not both.
• Beginner: Requires word lists to converse, not comfortable with Lojban grammar.

Note that all expertise rankings mentioned on this page are with respect to spoken, conversational Lojban only. Note further that neither Nick or Robin Lee Powell consider ourselves Fluent. Everyone else seems to consider Nick fluent, though, so this may just be that we have high standards of the word Fluency. Since I started this group, though, I get to define the terms.

There used to be a mailing list for discussing the phone group; it was called jbofongri, and can be found here.