me lu ju'i lobypli li'u 10 moi

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For a full list of issues, see zo'ei la'e "lu ju'i lobypli li'u".
Previous issue: me lu ju'i lobypli li'u 9 moi.
Next issue: me lu ju'i lobypli li'u 11 moi.

Copyright, 1989, 1991, by the Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane,
Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA Phone (703) 385-0273
[email protected]

All rights reserved. Permission to copy granted subject to your verification that this is the latest version of this document, that your distribution be for the promotion of Lojban, that there is no charge for the product, and that this copyright notice is included intact in the copy.


Number 10 - November-December 1989
Published by: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031 USA (703)385-0273

Ju'i Lobypli (JL) is the quarterly journal of The Logical Language Group, Inc., known in these pages as lalojbangirz. la lojbangirz. is a non-profit organization formed for the purpose of completing and spreading the logical human language "Lojban". The newsletter section of Ju'i Lobypli is separately published under the name le lojbo karni(LK). This issue was supposed to be produced in September, but the trip to Worldcon, our rapid growth, and time spenton legal work all have contributed to delays. This issue is now intended to be mailed with LK11, which will inciden-tally save us some postage costs. The added time also gave us a larger quantity of Lojban writings to choose from, andmore time to ensure that what we are printing is correct. We still intend to gain a month in publishing, but it will apparently not be until issue #13 that we will do so.

Some 290 of you will receive this issue of Ju'i Lobypli; we now have over 600 subscribers to le lojbo karni.

As noted in LK11, we have now received IRS approval for Section 501(c)(3) status, and your donations (not contributions to your voluntary balance) are tax-deductible on U.S. and most state income taxes, back-dated to our incorporation last year. We will notify all donors at the end of the year of the total deductible donations we have received from you. Our finances are still in bad condition: we hope that a few of you will remember us in your holiday budgets. We note for all potential donors that our bylaws require us to spend no more than 30% of our receipts on administrative and overhead expenses, and that you are welcome to make you gifts conditional upon our meeting this requirement.


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Contents of This Issue There is no news section in this issue, since we are coming out with LK11. Our major content this issue is Lojban text(some 3200 words total), written by people other than Bob and Nora. The key Lojban text is Athelstan's translation of a short story named "The Open Window", written by British author Saki. We want to encourage Lojbanists to seriously attempt to back-translate and read the Lojban on your own, and have printed it double-spaced, included some guidelines on translating and reading, and also some word lists. You will have to deduce the meaning of tanru and lujvo on your own, though. We've provided guidelines and word lists enough in past issues that most of you should be able to do this. This issue also contains discussions of Lojban poetry forms by poet Michael Helsem and Athelstan, of various aspects of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and testing thereof, and some explanations of some cmavo that seem to be giving people trouble.

						   Table of Contents

News Notes						      ---2
On Lojban Poetry
   'Skaldic Poetry and Lojban' by Athelstan		      ---3
   Michael Helsem on Lojban Poetry Forms		      ---4
le lojbo se ciska
   Guidelines for Understanding	Unfamiliar Lojban Text	      ---6
   A Palindrome	by Michael Helsem; A Lojban Aphorism by	Michael	Helsem	   ---7
   Self-Description by T. Peter	Park			      ---8
   A letter to Marcia Greenough	by T. Peter Park; Two letters to Deb Wunder by T. Peter	Park   ---8
   From	Genesis	by T. Peter Park
   An Original Science Fiction Story by	Jamie Bechtel	      ---9
   A Re-translation of a Paragraph by JCB in Scientific	American by T. Peter Park    ---10
   Roswell, New	Mexico,	1947 by	T. Peter Park		     ---10
   A Short Lesson in Office Politics by	T. Peter Park	     ---10
   A Syllogism by Lewis	Carroll, translated by Sylvia Rutiser---11
   The Open Window by Saki, translated by Athelstan	     ---12
Translations of	le lojbo se ciska (in order listed above)    ---16
   Retranslation of The	Open Window by Saki, as	translated by Athelstan	   ---25
Letters, Comments, and Responses: from Greg Higley; from various people	on '	---32
How Many Primitives Does Loglan	Need?, by Jeff Prothero	     ---35
Mini Grammar Lessons: On du; On	cu; On ke; On ti, ta, tu vs. vi, va, vu; On po'e, po, pe, po'u;
   On go'i vs. ti vs. di'u vs. la'edi'u			     ---37
On Sapir-Whorf
   LogFest Report by pc	and Athelstan			     ---40
   Discussion on Jim Brown's Sapir-Whorf Test in Loglan	1 4th Edition
      from Bob & Athelstan's Unabridged	Review		     ---41
      from pc (John Parks-Clifford)			     ---44

Mini-cmavo List	for use	in Translations			    insert


News Notes

It's been less than a week since LK11 went to the printer, but the Lojban world keeps moving. Bob did another radio interview on 11 December, with a British station: 'Atlantic 192'. We've received a copy of the San Francisco version of the Oldenburg article. It was somewhat truncated, so if we get to distribute the Washington Post version next issue, those who see versions in other papers may want to reread to see if they missed anything.

Bob now has a Usenet/Internet mailbox address, compliments of Eric Raymond, who has set up his Lojban network with about 60 names so far. Eric is a long distance call, and Bob won't be checking his mailbox very often, so Post Office mail is more efficient. But computer files, Lojban text, and articles for LK and JL can be sent now [email protected].

Finally, Rick Harrison tells me that Alembic, listed in LK11 credits, is ceasing publication.


On Lojban Poetry

We have comments from two people on the subject of Lojban poetry. Athelstan writes primarily on one form of poetry with which he is familiar: skaldic poetry. Michael Helsem writes in response to the brief comments I made in LK10 in describing the article by Athelstan.


There is a question commonly asked of us, not really relevant to Lojban, which we can answer in connection with the following article. This is 'Does Athelstan have a last name?'. The answer is both yes and no.

Athelstan's name comes from Old Norse; family names were not used for identification in that culture. Instead, surnames would be granted, generally by nobility, in recognition for some great or significant deed, somewhat after the manner of modern honorary degrees. In the absence of such an honor, different people with the same first name would be distinguished by their place of origin or trade, a practice that eventually led to our modern practice. Honorific surnames wouldn't be used in the same way as modern family names, but rather only in an appropriate context. Athelstan obviously has a place he was born, but he does not need this 'surname' to distinguish him from others. How many other people do you know by the name of Athelstan?

But, in addition to a locative surname, Athelstan has been rewarded (by appropriate authorities familiar with the tradition) with two different honorific surnames for noteworthy deeds in unrelated fields (Athelstan is a person of diverse talents). The stories are long, and perhaps I can talk Athelstan into writing of them (in Lojban) for later issues; he tells these stories quite interestingly, in the old bardic tradition. But in any case, he uses them only in the appropriate context. The following article is one such place, since one of his honorific surnames stems from his demonstrated mastery of skaldic forms. (T. Peter Park uses the other honorific surname in his description of the New York Lojban meeting, printed in LK11.)


Skaldic Poetry and Lojban

by Athelstan B‚rfoetskald

English speakers may be unaware of the wealth of possible forms of poetry that exist in the world's literature. Most English poetry is dominated by a single form, end-rhyme, in which the final word of each line rhymes with one or more other lines; the exact lines in a stanza which are paired or grouped in rhyme differ according the specific form, giving us such end-rhyme forms as doggerel, limericks, and sonnets. End-rhyme is often elaborated by requiring particular matching stress patterns in each rhyming pair or group of lines. End-rhyme has proven less interesting for modern poets, who abandon rhyme, stress pattern, or both to achieve a density or abstractness of expression uncon strained by form.

There are many other possible forms, including forms that ignore rhyme and which count only stressed syllables (Germanic long-line, the form of Beowulf, is an example). In languages that do not have stress as a distinguishing characteristic of tone, the syllable count in each line is important. Japanese haiku is probably the most well-known of these forms; it requires no rhyme or meter; instead it has exactly three lines with 17 syllables in a 5/7/5 pattern, with the added requirement that it demonstrate a particular 'balance' in harmony/disharmony of subject, sound, and meter.

Of poetry's many forms, English end-rhyme does not seem especially suited for Lojban. This is but a guess, based on the limited number of gismu that rhyme and the lujvo architecture that limits the variety of ideas that will end in matching sounds. Many other poetic forms may be more apropos to Lojban's sound and word structures. In this article, I shall concentrate on the Norse alliterative poetry of the skalds, and in particular the drottkvaet, or court metre.


First some definitions:


The common unit of skaldic poetry is the strophe, or stanza, which consists of four lines, or eight half-lines. Unlike much of English poetry, these lines are usually not grammatically intact sentences or phrases - sentence structure is independent of line structure. In fact, such poetry often has several independent 'sentence' thoughts going at once, with the harmony of sound helping the listener piece the structures together.

Each line consists of two half-lines. There is an odd half-line with exactly six syllables, three of which are accented. Each odd half-line is followed by an even half- line, also with exactly six syllables, three accented. Unlike English end-rhyme forms, all alliteration and rhyme takes place in the accented syllables, or beats. I will for this discussion use the most common stress pattern, trochaic. That is, each beat is followed by an unstressed syllable.

Two syllables alliterate if their initial sounds are alike: the words 'fight', 'far' and 'phantasm' alliterate. Any two syllables that begin with vowels also alliterate. In each line of skaldic poetry, exactly two beats in the odd half-line and the first beat in the even half-line alliterate.

A full rhyme is one that shares the same vowel and final consonant sounds in one syllable: 'rat'/'cat', 'rut'/'cut' and 'rough'/'cuff' are full rhymes. A half rhyme differs from a full rhyme in that the vowel sound must be different: 'rat'/'cut', 'rut'/'cat' and 'rough'/'cough' are half rhymes. In each line of skaldic poetry, a half rhyme appears in exactly two of the three beats in the odd half-line, including the third beat. In the even half- line, a full rhyme appears in exactly two beats, also including the third, but the pattern need not be the same as in the odd half-line.


This is an unfamiliar (and complicated) form to many, so I include here an English language example of a skaldic strophe. (It's not really supposed to have great meaning in it - this is only an example.) Please note that the last syllables of each half-line are unstressed and so neither rhyme nor alliterate. The alliterations appear in bold print, the full rhymes in italics, and the half rhymes are underlined. Vowel alliterations are marked with a bold period.

  Sing with me a song of				   
     soaring birds and words that			   
  tell of hawks; The hall of				   
     heaven flows with prose of				   
  .owls	and .airborne furless				   
     .awful bats with hats on.				   
  Night	and day	are not	the				   
     nicest times for rhymes' sound.			   

Strophes were informally composed and recited singly or in pairs, but more formal occasions demanded the long lay, or drapa form. This consists of twenty or more strophes, partitioned into three or more parts by a chorus of one, two or four lines which ended a strophe or stood alone.

Skaldic poetry often used a figurative metaphor known as a kenning, whose canonical English form is 'x of the y'. For example, "steed of the waves" is a kenning for 'ship', and "whales' road" stands for 'ocean'. In some drapas, kennings are all-pervasive and no thing is directly named.


I think that Lojban is well suited phonologically and grammatically to the use of skaldic form. Lojban gismu are trochaic in meter, and Lojban's penultimate word-stress system is conducive to the regular patterns required. The large number of independently elidable cmavo words allows one to alter the rhythm of the utterance to suit the form. Moreover, the morphology allows us to vary the length and form of a lujvo, allowing the poet to choose the word form that best suits the meter without changing the meaning.

We have the ability in Lojban to mark a word as figurative in its use, and so we may use kennings at will, but we also have the option of redefining the grammar for the poem to treat all two word metaphors as kennings, and may thus accommodate the all-kenning form as well.

I shall attempt such poetry in the near future as my schedule permits, but I put it forth to all aspiring Lojban poets to explore this and other alliterative poetry forms. In addition to formal skaldic poetry, there may be other patterns, more or less structured, that will project the full color of Lojban's expressive nature. A new language calls for new ideas, and for the reexamination of old ones.


Michael Helsem on Lojban Poetry Forms

... Lojban poetry. I am eager to see Athelstan's proposal, being a skaldic aficionado myself (albeit non- Norskophone), but I have grave doubts already. (I do admire the grandeur of its absurdity -- akin to one of the projects to write quantitative verse in English!) Lojban is a non-inflected language with numerous non-elidable function words (at least in its grammatically correct form), whereas such rigorous modes of versification as Dr¢ttkvaett (or haiku for that matter) require either a language that is inherently terse (i.e. inflected), or else a polyvalent grammar like the anarchical tradition of En- glish poetry gives access to (--my English skaldic verse must seem totally twisted to anyone who doesn't know those conventions). (Or a tradition of broken utterance, which is haiku's, as any literal rendering will show.) Athelstan is absolutely correct in perceiving Lojban's consonantal richness as the salient poetic character. But that applies only to its core vocabulary. Include all the function words as they naturally occur, and Lojban has a greater resemblance to a pizzicato language like Hawaiian or Japanese, than to the surflike pounding of Germanic lines in Alliterative-Accentual. Another thing: it takes many near-synonyms to be able to say what you want and have it alliterate. I don't foresee this ever being true of Lojban unless it swamps its carefully-distinguishable word-hoard with a ton of redundant imports...

I imagine Lojban poetry will eventually create brand new forms out of its own vast uniqueness which is hardly perceptible yet to those who think in English (or other natural language) first. I've got a few noodly intimations I'm reluctant to pontificate upon before I can substantiate them with practical excellence, but I can say right now that the "abstract ideas of modern poetry" find a greatly expanded range in this language with few concrete noun- distinctions (names of birds, flowers, and feelings), but capable of phrases such as "mu'e laxyzva" -- "The achievement of balance-presence" (which may mean just "poise", or imply a whole world of Taoist philosophy). -- so naturally and yet so suggestively.

I guess a lot of people still identify "poetry" with rhyme+meter, although almost no poets even attempt them anymore outside of popular music. For Lojban to be shoehorned into existing English poetic forms is not quite the contortionist feat that skaldic verse would be, but my earlier point still applies. In addition, Lojban has few natural rhymes, and hardly any 'good' ones at all. 'Love' (prami) rhymes only with 'computer' (skami) and 'acid' (slami), while 'desire' (djica) rhymes with 'differ' (frica) and -- too closely -- 'deceive' (tcica), for example. Compare fire/desire or Schmerz/Herz et al... This is not as bad as Esperanto, which rhymes Vulva and Gunpowder; still, artificial languages seem uniformly unfortunate in this respect. More sophisticated devices, like slant-rhyme, assonance, and particularly the combination of an initial and a medial consonance (muzga zgana; lujvo jvinu), I suggest, are well worth trying in an irregular way. But, to use Pound's nomenclature, Lojban excels in aptness for meaning-subtlety (Logopoeia) rather than phonic luxuriance (Mekpoeia) or pictorial descriptiveness (Phanopoeia).

Lojban is an athletic language; it stretches your mind with challenging concept-divergences and novel connections. Making lujvo will probably be its first and most popular word game always; just as Crosswords exploit the hodgepodge of English megavocabulary, lujvo involve the very quiddity of Lojban. I predict that it will eventually become a much-used source of return-borrowings for many natural languages, somewhat as classical Greek has continued to provide new loans for scientific usage.

One last thing. I think there might be a definite limerick potential. Anapests seem to come easier than iambs; and what rhymes exist, have a quality that reminds me of a triple rhyme in English -- as can be found in the dustier corners of a rhyming dictionary: mentor-centaur, gurgle-burgle, muscular-crepuscular. This is a Special Effect, like fireworks, not the constant recurrence of a mild harmony (like rhyme in Italian or Spanish)...


Athelstan responds with two notes:

  1. Germanic languages were not as terse as they are now, precisely because they were more highly inflected. Latin and Greek were very highly inflected, and they are anything but terse.
  2. There are usually several directions from which to approach a concept: function, appearance, resemblance, effects, etc. Many gismu are also expressible as conversions of other gismu. Combined with the further tool of kenning description, Lojban promises as rich and diverse a phonetic realm as is available in any language, past or present.


Bob adds some other points:

Lojban has more rhyme capability than Michael indicates. It is true that there isn't much rhyming capability among gismu, but among lujvo there should be considerably more rhymes. After all, all Lojban brivla end in a vowel or diphthong, and there are only so many possible endings.

It is true, though, that many of the rhyming syllables would be based on sharing the same rafsi, leading to a lack of variety of pure rhyming forms. But moving beyond pure rhyme, into Athelstan's half-rhyme and alliterative schemes should allow Lojban to show great richness. After all, Lojban has a much more restricted set of permitted word endings, and a smaller set of phonemes, than does English. Since there are, at least theoretically, more possible Lojban words than English words, this suggests a higher density of rhymes and near-rhymes than English has. Time will tell if this is a real feature of the language, and not a false extrapolation.

Lojban has many non-elidable structure words, but it has many elidable ones as well. It can even be said that Lojban's optional tense system is an elidable form of inflection. "pu klama" can be said to be an inflected form of "klama"; however, Lojban inflections are both optional and completely regular. It is unclear why this would be a disadvantage in poetry as compared with inflected languages, as Michael implies.

With regard to sound and rhythm, I cannot say whether Lojban is more like Japanese than like German. However, since Lojban is a language with stress-oriented pronunciation, one would suspect that rhythm, (as opposed to rhyme) would follow the strong-stressed patterns of Germanic languages, as opposed to the syllabic rhythms that I believe are typical of most oriental languages (as well as French). The consonant clustering, is of course reminiscent of Slavic languages; perhaps we should examine Slavic poetry forms to determine some additional possibilities for Lojban.

I am not well-versed in poetry, but I am going to be getting a bit of experience in devising Lojban forms: the Arabian Nights tales that I am working on are scattered with embedded verse, as well as a frequently alliterative and simply-rhyming prose. I'll be trying to capture the Arabic richness of pattern in Lojban, just as Burton tried to capture it into English. As an example, which helps belie Michael's perception of a lack of synonyms, Burton's English translation of a vocative (near the beginning of the first story) reads "O King of the time and Caliph of the tide ..."; the "tide" here obviously means "season", as in "Yuletide".

Lojban is fully capable of expressing this parallel metaphor of nearly identical meanings with two totally unrelated expressions, just as English does: "doi nolrai co turni be le temci be'o je catni be le cabna" (O superlative-noble type-of [governor of the time-interval and authority over the present]), and I even captured the alliteration (which is highly valued in Arabic poetry and a feature that Burton tries to emulate) at least as well as the English does. (I won't promise such successful Arabic poeticity in the rest of my translation.)


In the final analysis, both Michael and Athelstan may be right. We have to try new ideas and see what works for Lojban. If we can give rebirth to old forms that have been lost to English, great. If people choose to develop a new cultural form of poetry, this may even be evidence of a new Sapir-Whorf effect of a type never consider by Jim Brown and others.


le lojbo se ciska

Guidelines for Understanding Unfamiliar Lojban Text

Even if you only have a gismu list and rafsi indexes, you should be able to usefully work on translating the following. With simple cmavo lists, you can probably get most of the meaning, while if you've studied the textbook lessons, almost all of the texts that follow should be un- derstood.

This doesn't mean that you necessarily can just read the Lojban text straight and understand it. There are some tricks that a new learner can use to maximize understanding. This section attempts to explain the technique that we had the Lojban class use in tackling unfamiliar text.

You should not allow yourself to be hampered by what you haven't yet studied, or what you don't have lists for. Translate what you can, and you may be able to interpolate the rest. Failing this, look at the literal and colloquial English translations in the section following, and try to figure out the function and/or meaning of the word or construct that you didn't understand, before moving on to the next sentence.


Noting that all sentences start with .i and that new paragraphs start with ni'o or ni'oni'o, do the following (the first two paragraphs of the English re-translation of Saki in the next section have been marked in the manner suggested as a sample):

  1. Put brackets [] around each sentence in the text. Put quote marks "" around each quotation (starts with "lu" and ends with "li'u", or is a single word preceded by the word "zo" (which indicates single-word quotation). Parentheses (mark them as such) are indicated by "to" as the left parenthesis, and "toi" as the right parenthesis. "sei" and "se'u" are another set of matching left and right parentheses markers (indicating a metalinguistic comment - consider a sei/se'u comment as a parenthetical sentence em- bedded in the other sentence, although sumti will always be attached with "be" and "bei" in such a sentence) (the "se'u" can sometimes be elided, so don't worry if you don't find it), and are generally found totally within another sentence. Leave right ends unmarked if you can't find them; if the text is grammatical, they will become ap- parent. Marking these major constructs gives you the gross structure of the text.
  2. Put braces {} around the contents of any NU abstraction clause. The left side is marked by a member of NU lexeme (nu, ka, ni, jei, su'u, zu'o, pu'u, mu'e, si'o, li'i, za'i). These may be compounded with le, lo, loi, lei, or one of the other articles in lexeme LE, e.g. "lenu". The end of a sentence or the word "kei" always closes an abstraction clause; a "cu" may also close it, but don't assume so at this point - leave the right edge unmarked if it isn't obvious. The text within an abstraction clause is a sentence, so when you translate the sentence, you'll then find the right end.
  3. For each sentence, analyze it from left to right. Identify and translate each brivla. If it is next to another brivla, it is a tanru, so translate the tanru as a whole. A brivla may be preceded by "na", which negates it; include the "na" in the tanru.


If a brivla or tanru is preceded by an article in lexeme LE, then the whole is a sumti. Put a single underline under each sumti as you identify it.
If a brivla or tanru is preceded by "cu", then it is the main selbri of a bridi sentence. Put a double underline under each selbri as you identify it (the "cu" is not part of the selbri).
A selbri may be preceded by a tense instead of by "cu" (a tense is usually a single cmavo or a compound containing one or more of ba, ca, pu, vi, va, vu, zi, za, zu; e.g. "ca klama"). You will use double underlines for tensed selbri as well (the tense is not part of the selbri); however, a tense on a brivla does not necessarily mean that you have a selbri. Look at the word before the tense. If the tense is preceded by a member of LE (e.g. le pu jmive), the construct is a sumti, and should be single-underlined; otherwise it is a selbri and should be double-underlined.
Not all selbri are marked with "cu" or a tense; especially when following an anaphora (pronoun). In "mi klama", "mi" is a sumti and "klama" is a selbri. However, "lemi klama" (or "le mi klama", same difference) is a sumti - the "le" makes all the difference.
As you can see, telling the difference between sumti and selbri is the toughest thing in the language. It is best to start from the left, marking off sumti. If you come to a brivla that isn't a sumti, it generally is a selbri.

  1. Relative clauses and phrases help identify sumti, and are sub-sentences and sumti, respectively.
    1. Relative clauses are attached to sumti with noi or poi. These are embedded bridi sentences, so mark the noi/poi as a left edge of a bridi clause with a left carat '<'. By the grammar, you also know that what precedes the noi/poi is a sumti. The end of a relative clause is marked by "ku'o" (which may be elided). Relative clauses are also often terminated by running into the end of the sentence or into the main selbri of the sentence, so again, don't worry if you don't find a right edge. Mark right edges, as you identify them, with a right carat '>'.
    2. Relative phrases are attached to sumti with pe, po'u, po, po'e, ne, no'u, and goi, and a few other members of lexeme GOI that occur infrequently. If you see one of these words, then that which follows it is a sumti AND that which precedes it is also a sumti. The second sumti modifies or relates to the first in some way depending on the particular cmavo. Put a pair of equal signs around one of these attaching terms, since they usually indicate some type of relationship between the two sumti so joined.
  2. Most cmavo not already mentioned will be in one of four lexemes.
    1. Anaphora (pronouns) are in lexeme KOhA and lexeme DA. Most frequently these include mi, do, mi'o, ma'a, zu'i, zo'e, da, de, di, ko'a, ko'e, ko'i, ko'o, ko'u. These are all sumti, although they may be found in a compound possessive form: lemi stizu, in which case the article, anaphora, and brivla together make up a sumti.
    2. Most unfamiliar cmavo will be either a sumti tag in lexeme BAI or FA, or a discursive in lexeme UI. If you have a cmavo list, look among those lexemes first. UI lexeme has no effect on the grammar - you can ignore them until you have all the rest of the sentence figured out. sumti tags are always followed by a sumti, so you can also ignore them, except to use them to find a sumti that is otherwise unidentified.
  3. By now, you should have well marked up the Lojban, and have underlined or marked pretty much every word in the sentence. This is because everything in a sentence is either a sumti, a discursive, or the main selbri. Now translate the sentence, piece by piece, as best as you can. (Remember that "le bajra" translates as "the runner", not "the run".) You may fail on the first several sentences, and have to look at our translations to see the pieces, but you will find that you quickly get the hang of it. The procedure only seems complicated at first; you'll be doing it in your head rather than on paper after a bit of experience.

I'll let Michael start off with some of his Lojbanic attempts. We'll have more eventually, but I'm less willing to play with someone's phrasing to make it grammatical in the case of something labelled 'poetry' instead of 'prose', for fear of losing some intended sound or meaning effects.


A Palindrome (mitfa'e lerpoi)

by Michael Helsem

.a'u le rapcalku cu klacpare lu'a

(I wish!) The repeat-shell is a going (to/from) climber, loosely speaking.

Bob: The significance of this statement is left to the reader, but it is both grammatical and a valid palindrome.


A Lojban Aphorism by Michael Helsem (corrected by Bob)

.uu lo'e rarbau cu simlu jalge loi cmadjizu'e pe sekai lo ta'e drabai ka juxre

(Sorrow!) The typical natural-language is a seeming-result of small-want-acts (random acts) which-are-characterized-by habitually correct-forcer awkwardness.

This is approximated by: The typical natural language seems to result from random acts of awkwardness forced by correctness.


Self-Description

by T. Peter Park

coi pendo

.i mi du la tipitr. park. poi cnino lojbytadni

ni'o mi ckuzdacertu je bancertu je circertu .i mi gunka vi le ckuzda po'e la linbruk. pe vi la cladaplus. .i puzuze'uku mi tadni le nintei ropno citri vi le balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .i lemi ralju naljibri nu gasnu cu zu'o tadni le prijypenla'u .e loi bangu .i mi pu'i tavla gi'a tcidu vau la gliban. .e la .estyban. .e la frasyban. .e la tcoban. .e la spanban. .e la portyban. .e la .italban. .e la sfedban. .e la ruskyban. .i mi steci nelci lezu'o tadni la lojban. .i mi mutce nelci loinu kasta'a noi kansa loi menli .a zdile prenu

ni'o mi pu jbena la .erix. park. .e la .ilmen. park. ca la pasovopananc. vi la .estis. noi pucaze'a sepli gugde gi'e caca pagbu le softo badyjecta .i mi capu xabju la .iunaitydsteits. zai la pasovobinanc. .i mi capu tadni vi le slacitcu'e po'e la linbruk. .e le balcu'e po'u la .adelfais. .e le su'ore balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .e la MERiland. .i mi pu tadni le ckuzdaske vi le balcu'e po'e la MERiland.

ni'o mi capu ciska re lojbyciksi torselcusku

co'o


A letter to Marcia Greenough

by T. Peter Park

coi marcan.

.i mi du la tipitr. park.

ni'o lemi nu penmi do ca le midydeisa'i noi pu kansa la krtis. bruks. cu mutce pluka mi .i mi mutce nelci loinu kasta'a noi kansa lei menli prenu

ni'o mi ckuzdacertu gi'e bancertu gi'e circertu .i mi gunka vi le ckuzda po'e la linbruk. pe vi la cladaplun. .i pu tadni loi nintei ropno citri vi le balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .i lemi ralju naljibri nu gasnu cu zu'o bantadni .i mi steci nelci lezu'o tadni la lojban.

.i .e'o ko dunda lemi nu rinsa kei la kyrtis. .e la djak. danyvan.

.i mi du la pitr.


Two letters to Deb Wunder
by T. Peter Park

coi deb.

.i mi du la tipitr. park. .i mi ckuzdacertu gi'e bancertu gi'e circertu .i mi gunka vi le ckuzda po'e la linbruk. pe vi la cladaplus. .i mi pu tadni loi nintei ropno citri vi le balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .i lemi ralju naljibri nu gasnu cu zu'o bantadni

ni'o lemi'o nu fonkasta'a pu mutce pluka mi .i mi mutce nelci loi menli je zdile nu kasta'a

ni'o mi vi benji re jbociksi selsku do .i mi pu ciska ri .i .a'o ri ba pluka do

.i mi du la pitr.


coi deb.

.i mi pu mutce nelci lenu penmi do .ije mi pu mutce nelci lenu penmi la lojbab. .e la noras. .e la. .atlstan. .e la .abis. .e la .erik. TIdeman. .e la .art. .uiners. .e la morokos.

ni'o ledo ka prenu cu mutce pluka mi

ni'o .a'u mi djica lenu do lifri lo mutce gleki je melbi ke cizemoi bendei .i mi pacna lenu do lifri lo mutce gleki cizemoi nanca .ije mi pacna ledo naldu'e ka selzunti ledo malmensi

ni'o mi du ledo pendo poi du la tipitr.


From Genesis

by T. Peter Park, corrected by Bob

.i la cev. pu zbasu le tsani .e la ted. vi lenu cfari
ni'o la cev. pu cusku
     lu ko loi gusni cu cfari leka zasti li'u
.ije loi gusni pu cfari leka zasti

An Original Science Fiction Story

by Jamie Bechtel

Jamie wrote this in July, having received only Lessons 1-6, and a couple of hours tutoring at LogFest in June. Nearly all of the grammar he uses is covered in those 6 lessons, showing how much you can do with just a little Lojban grammar.

This is the first original Lojban science fiction, perhaps the start of a long tradition.


loi dacti poi farlu le tsani

mi pupu platu lenu viska lo skina poi se cmene be le latmo cmene be loi xirma .i lera cmene du zo ekuus.

.i mi stali lemi kumfa ki'u lo vlipa ke bratu carvi .i mi tcidu lo cukta ki'u la'edi'u

.i mi tirna lo cladu pe vi le gapru loldi .i mi bajra ra .i le savru krasi cu barda bratu .i ri pu farlu klama fo le drudi fi le tsani

.i mi cikre le drudi kalri

.i mi tirna lo du'e savru pe vi le danmo tubli

.i mi bajra le danmo tubli kalri gi'e zgana lo bratu .i mi na kakne lenu cikre kei mu'i leka tcima

.i savru vi le cnita loldi .i le savru cu na rarna .i mu'i la'edi'u mi cu terpa .i mi na birti catlu.

.i lo dukse cizra prenu cu sanli ta .i ra dukse barda ke blabi kubli gi'e ponse lo dukse ni moklu.

.i ra pu farlu le tsani .i mi zgana lo drata ke cizra dacti poi farlu le tsani .i nalci since

.i pa lera moklu cu bacru lu ko na terpa .i le jmive ranji temci po'e ro lemi prenu cu mentu li paci .i mi na kakne lenu mi xrani li'u

.i mi cu se spaji lenu le cizra prenu cu cuksu fo la lojban

.i le tcima cu manku ri'anai la gaicac.

ni'oni'o ve'a loi citri ku loi prenu pu viska loinu cizra dacti carvi .i loi prenu cu viska lonu banfi carvi .i lonu curnu carvi .i lonu lijda dacti carvi

ni'o mi puzu penmi lo tordu nanmu .i ri krici lu da poi loi prenu cu krici cu fasnu li'u .i lu la'edi'u ca na fasnu seja'e ma li'u se cpedu mi .i lu ma'a krici loi saske .enai loi lijda li'u

ni'oni'o le cizra prenu cu morsi .i le since cu citka le morsi cizra .i ba la'edi'u le since cu gapci


A Re-translation of a Paragraph by JCB in Scientific American

by T. Peter Park

Short story from James Cooke Brown, "Loglan", Scientific American, June, 1960, p. 61:

Lojban version:

le le jenmi gidva goi ko'e ge'u girzu lidne goi ko'a pu cusku leko'a ka selpluka leko'a nu cusku leko'a ka puzuzai djuno le fatci .i ko'a pu tsali cusku lu ko'e .ia na tcica mi ri'anai leko'e nu troci li'u gi'e pu minde leko'e noi du zenono prenu ku'o ka pinfu leko'e kumfa


Roswell, New Mexico, 1947

by T. Peter Park

le varjenmi sonlidne goi ko'a pu skicu le seljanli volcukla ko'e goi le varsonci .e le skeprenu ku lo kensa marce gi'e pu skicu le ze morsi ke re'atra xadni poi pupu va se facki .i ko'a pu kajde ko'e lu loka jecta snura cu se sarcu loka mulno mipri noi srana ti li'u


A Short Lesson in Office Politics

by T. Peter Park, corrected by Nora

The preceding pieces by T. Peter use fairly straight-forward grammar, and are relatively short. There were minor errors, of the types discussed in the mini-grammar discussions at the end of this issue, but T. Peter gets full credit for the work: he did quite well. This translation is considerably longer, and uses more complex grammar. Nora had to make substantial changes to make it both grammatical and to mean what T. Peter indicated in his translation. Since we didn't have time to get T. Peter's approval of the changes before publication, Nora is also listed in the credits.


tordu tadnyspi co srana lo pu'u briju selturni

ni'o loi jikcecmu senlanli noi la .erix. from. e la deivid. rizman. e la .arlin. rasel. xokcaild. mupli cu jinvi lenu lenu se cinmo seljitro fa loi jibgunka cu ralju mupli lo jikca nalzifre

.i le senlanli cu skicu leka bapli pe leka roroi cisma .e leka roroi pluka gasnu

.i le cukta poi se cmene lu nu camrivbi leka zifre li'u pe ci'a la from. ge'u .e lu le sepci'o so'irpre vau li'u pe ci'a la rizman. ge'u .e lu le seljitro risna po'a vau li'u pe ci'a la xokcaild. cu skicu gi'e senlanli vau le nalrarna ke cinmo nu jitro po'u ru

.i loi ta'e pluka gasnu ke briju je zarci gunka na'o klesi se fendi fi re frica girzu

.i loi pamoi girzu gunka so'eroi xendo gasnu fi loi kansa gunka gi'e milxe pendo je sidju gasnu fi loi tervecnu .a loi selselfu

.i loi remoi girzu gunka roroi carmi pluka je pendo je cisma je clite simlu gasnu fi loi tervecnu .a loi selselfu gi'e so'iroi jursa je minde gasnu fi loi kansa gunka

.i loi pamoi girzu gunka cu traji vajni jinvi loi se cinmo be loi kansa gunka gi'e so'iroi milxe lanzu bo simsa jinvi sera'a loi kansa gunka

.i loi gunka po'u ra cu gungri cmima jundi gunka

.i loi remoi girzu gunka cu traji vajni jinvi loi terzukte fi le kagni gi'e lazni ja nalpendo jinvi sera'a loi ckamu carmi ke pluka je sutra ke'e gasnu gunka gi'e ckamu vajni jinvi sera'a le se cinmo be loi kansa gunka

.i pisu'o loi pamoi girzu gunka no'u loi gungri cmima jundi gunka ku mabla bo po'i ganxo bo cinba po'a je ke drata gunka bradi ke'e jinvi sera'a loi remoi girzu gunka


A Symbolic Logic Problem by Lewis Carroll

translated by Sylvia Rutiser

This translation was Sylvia's 'final examination' from the Lojban class, and she did quite well, though some problems were later identified in discussions with pc. In going over the translation in class, we discussed how to write this logical material in a more 'logical' form, adding the answer. Bob took notes and expanded to include the full text of Carroll's original, which was stated as a logic problem with solution, and stipulated symbols to be used for the various propositions.

ro da poi na mulno leka melbi claxu ka'e se stuzi lo vitke se zdile kumfa

.i no da poi se jadni lo silna cu mulno leka sudga

.i no da poi na mulno leka na cilmo ka'e se stuzi lo vitke se zdile kumfa

.i ro da poi lumci minji cu se stuzi lo xamsi korbi

.i no da poi se zbasu fi lo calku jemna cu mulno leka melbi claxu

.i ro da poi se stuzi lo xamsi korbi cu se jadni lo silna


Bob's expansion and correction:

leflogji nabmi ci'a la lu,is. keral. vau

ni'osa'a faisa'a

ni'o de'e se cmima lo nalsucta jufra noi zo'e stidi lenu ke'a selru'a co nibypoi. .i lo se nibli cu se facki ko

ni'osa'a faisa'a

ni'o muremo'o tu'e

pamai ro da poi na mulno leka claxu loika melbi cu selcu'i co selra'e selstu lo vitke nunzdi kumfa

.ije remai no da poi se jadni lo silna cu su'oroi mulno leka sudga

.ije cimai no da selcu'i .ei co selra'e selstu lo vitke nunzdi kumfa gi'enai mulno leka na cilmo

.ije vomai ro da poi jinru minji cu roroi selra'e selstu lo xamsi korbi

.ije mumai no da poi se zbasu fi lo calku jmepilka cu mulno leka claxu loika melbi

.ije xamai ro da poi selra'e selstu lo xamsi korbi cu bapu'i se jadni lo silna tu'u

ni'o ru'u roda dacti .ije ly .abu. du lu'elu mulno leka claxu loika melbi li'u .ije ly by. du lu'elu jinru minji li'u .ije ly cy. du lu'elu se jadni lo silna li'u .ije ly dy. du lu'elu selra'e selstu lo xamsi korbi li'u .ije ly .ebu. du lu'elu se zbasu fi lo calku jemna pilka li'u .ije ly xy. du lu'elu mulno leka sudga li'u seisa'a ri mintu leka sudga .ije ly ky. du lu'elu selcu'i co selra'e selstu lo vitke nunzdi kumfa li'u

ni'osa'a faisa'a


ni'o danfu

.isa'a faisa'a

.i muremo'o ni'ida'uku ro da poi jinru minji cu na se zbasu fi le calku jemna pilka


The Open Window by Saki

translated by Athelstan

This was Athelstan's 'final examination' from the class, and an excellent piece of work indeed. Most of the piece was written before the latest grammar change was approved, and Athelstan missed the class session on tense. As a result, Bob and Nora have updated Athelstan's work to the current grammar before publication, with Athelstan having gone over and approved most of the changes. The piece serves as an excellent tutorial on many more complex parts of the grammar. You will want to note in the translation several cmavo and grammar features that are not yet well-documented anywhere else. This piece is worth the considerable time it will take you to look up gismu and cmavo, analyze tanru and lujvo, and make your best guesses as to the grammatical meaning, then checking with our double-checked word-for-word translation and Saki's original English. We are providing a mini-cmavo list as a supplement to this issue to aid in your study.

This is a long piece, and some of the grammar is quite complex, perhaps even more complex than 'natural' fluent Lojban will be, since Athelstan was trying to capture the style, sentence order, and flavor, of Saki's writing. Thus some sentences are longer and more complex than they might need to be. Yet the Lojban is roughly the same length as the English.

Please notify us if you are totally confused by any construct. None of us are perfect at Lojban yet, and even work checked by three goods Lojbanists could still have errors and strangeness within. Your comments are appreciated.


mele kalri canko ci'a la sakis. vau

.i la fremtn.natl. goi fo'a troci lenu cusku le drani poi ke'a cu ge cusku pluka le cavizi tunbyti'u gi nake jikcaxlali le bavizi rirme'i .i secau lenu fo'a cusku kei fo'a senpi lenu le porsi nu jikri'i vitke lei pu na penmi kei cusidju le xanka ve mikce poi fo'a ca troci co se mikce ni'o lu ru'a mi djuno ledo bavuza tcini li'u lefo'a goi le go'i ku mensi pupu se bacru mu'i lenu fo'a ca binxo cobredi lenu xabju klama le puxirejeva nurma ke snura stuzi .i lu do bava jikca najenai tavla su'o jmive prenu .i ledoni xanka kei cu zenba ri'a lenu ranji badri .i da'i .ei mi ba dunda fi do fe lei pemydjuxa'a be fe ro leva prenu poi pujikca se penmi mi .i su'o ri cu sei dei jetnu befi leimi se morji se'u pu mutce pluka li'u

ni'o la fremtn. puxiso'e pensi lu xu la mezyz. sepltn. ne le ninmu poi fo'a dunda fi ke'a fe pa le pemdjuxa'a ku'ocu cmima lei pluka li'u .i lu xu do pu penmi so'i le viza prenu li'u preti fi le tunbyti'u mu'i lenu ri ca pajni leni na sance jikca kei lebanzu

.i lu go'i ji'ino prenu li'u se bacru la fremtn. .i lu lemi mensi puviza xabju la REKtoris. pu le puzi nanca vomei.i ra pu dunda su'o pemdjuxa'a befe su'o le viza prenu li'u .i romoi jufra bacru ci'o lenu selbirti xenru

.i lu ju'e do djuno le ji'inomei xu lemi rirme'i li'u ranji jmina preti se bacru le clite ke jikca kufra citni'u

.i lu go'i lo su'emei po'u lera cmene .e lera judri li'u tugni se danfu le vitke .i fo'a pensi kucli lenu lamezyz.sepltn. goi ko'u cu speni gi'a mroselspe .i da poi na kakne co se skicu zi'e pe le kumfa cu stidi leka nanmuxabju

.i lu leko'u goi ra banli betri cu fasnu puca le pu nanca be li ci seisa'a se cusku be le citno .i la'edi'u balvilenu ledo mensi vi xabju li'u vau

.i lu ki'a leko'u betri vau li'u preti fi la framtn. .i ki'u da fo le vive'a surla nurma stuzi fa lei betri cusimlu lo fange

.i lu se lakne lenu do kucli lenu mu'i ma mi'a rinka lenu leva canko cu ranji le kalri kei le mela aktobr.lecysoltei li'u se bacru le tunbyti'u noi ke'a ca farja'o le barda fasyvroca'o noi lamji le saurfoi

.i lu .i'e leni glare cu zmadu lo'e ni ca citsi glare seisa'a se cusku be la fremtn. .i ji'a xu le va canko fi dackini fe le betri li'u vau

lu tai lenu va canko pagre ku cazi le satci cibnanca purci ku ko'a goi ge leko'u speni gi leko'u re citno bruna cucliva zukte fi le leca djedi ku terdanti nunkalte

.i ko'a ko'a noroi xruti .i ca lenu ko'a cu ragve klama fo le rancimdre foldi fe leko'a selneirai ke cpirsnaipekatstu kei ro le cimei cu se ri'usrutu'o lo nurcau rancimderke'a .i ca le pu kufrydukti je carvi crisa sei se djunose'u loi stuzi poi ke'a cu snura ca lei drata nanca cu suksa je nalseljde nalsarji .i leko'a xadni cu noroi se facki.i la'edi'u kufrydukti pagbu li'u se bacru le tunbyti'u goi fo'e .i le voksa be le citno cazi binxo co ckaji leka jikcakufra na.e leka ci'orja'o co dirsre remna .i fo'e bacru lu la selke'i rirme'i cu roroi krici lenu ko'a ba xruti ko'a calo ba djedi .i ko'a noi se kansa le cmalu je bunre pangerku poi ke'a se cirko fa'u lenu ke'a kansa ko'a cu dzukla levinenri fo leva canko ta'i le purci po ko'a .i la'edi'u cu krinu lenu le canko cu kalri ranji fi ro le vanci pagbu peze'o le ctebixtei

.i la selke'i je selnei rirme'i goi ko'u puta'e tavla mi lesu'u cliva ne pu'e lenu ge leko'u speni goi ko'e cukansa ponse leko'e blabi je jacnalgre gacko'a noi ke'a dandu leko'e birka gi la ranis. po'u leko'u citrai bruna goi ko'icu sanga lu doi brtis. mu'i ma do plipe li'u noi roroi se sanga semu'i lenu zdifanza ko'u ku mu'i lenu ko'u xusra lenule nunsanga cu fanza ko'u .i sei ko djuno be la'edei so'uroiku ca lei bifcau je smaji vanci poi ke'a simsa ti ko'u mipiso'aroi pencauji'i lenu ro ko'a ba dzugre leva canko li'u

ni'o fo'e sisti tai lo cmalu nu desku .i la fremtn. surlybi'o va'o lenu le rirme'i cu so'irzu'edzukla le kumfanenri tai lo gunma be loi xernuncru pe mu'i lenu ko'u lerci lenu ko'u klama ti

.i lu mi pacna lenu la viras. capu zdile do li'u se bacru ko'u

.i lu ra capu carmi cinri li'u se bacru la fremtn. .i lu mi pacna lenu do na se fanza le kalri canko seisa'a sutra se bacru be la mezyz. sepltn. .i lemi speni cebruna goi ko'a cu zvati le selxa'u bazi leinu seldantysazri .i ko'a roroi nerkla fo ta .i ko'a pu bartu ca leicimynalsai foldi seni'i lenu ko'a ba galfi fi lo naljinsa kalsa fe lemi selke'i lolbu'u .i simsa leka medo po'u loinanmu kei vau xu li'u vau

.i ko'u gleki rajyta'a fi leinu seldantysazri .e le cipni ka so'umei .e leka cumki loi datka ca le dunra .i ga'ala fremtn. goi fo'a la'edi'u curve ka nalpu'a .i fo'a camtcu je su'episo'emei bo snada troci lenu fo'a galfi lenuterta'a kei lo mroru'i ckamu nu terta'a .i fo'a sanji lenu lefo'a selvi'e capu su'episo'umei jundi kei .e lenu leko'ukanla ru'i midyctarmu'u fo fo'a fi le kalri canko .e levu saurfoi .i fo'a birti lenu lefo'a vitke pe ca leca betrinacykefydei cu xlafunca cunkemdimnyfau

.i lu lei mikce cu tugni ri lenu ri mikce mi fo lonu mulno surla .e lonu menli ci'ordu'e claxu .e lonu mi rivbiroda poi simsa lonu vlile slugu'a li'u nuzba fi la fremtn. noi ke'a cu jinvi le su'episo'imei kampu jifselkri po'u lenuloi roroi penmi .e loi paroi cunpenmi cu nuzyxagji ro lo cmalu tcila be lei terbi'a .e lei termikce .e leiri rinka jevelmikce .i lu sera'a lemi ctipla ru cu na mutce tugni li'u se mi'acru fo'a .i lu xu na go'i li'u se bacru la mezyz. sepltn. sepi'o lo voksa poi cazi basti lo nalselcni nunva'u .i ko'u suksalenu binxo lo cikna jundi .i go'i mu'inai le se bacru be la fremtn.

.i lu ko'a vize'o klama ca .uo ku seisa'a se laucru be ko'u se'u cazi le tcatytei .i .ienaipei ko'a simsa zo'e poike'a cimdre se gacri ji'e le kanla li'u vau

.i la fremtn. piso'umei desku ri gi'e carna zu'i le tunbyti'u sekai leka firsku poi se djica fo'a lenu cusku lekaci'orkansa jimpe .i le citno cu caicta da pe vije'oza le kalri canko sekai leka lo cfipu ka teprai cu se jarco lefo'ekanla .i sekai leka lenku jenca co velskicycau nunte'a ku la fremtn. carna le seltse gi'e catlu fa'a le se go'i .i va'o le manbi'o vanci ku lo ci remtra goi ko'a cu dzukla fo le saurfoi vazai le canko .i roda po'u pa le cimeicu bevri lo terdanti seni'a leda birka .i pa le cimei cu mi'arbe'i lo blabi kosta noi dandu leri janco .i lo tatpi kebunre pangerku ca vazi ranji leko'a jafti'e .i sekai leka sancau ku ko'a jbibi'o le zdani .i lo ruble je citno voksacu sagysku ra'i lei manku fe lu mi pu cusku lu doi brtis. mu'i ma do plipe li'u li'u

.i la fremtn. cilce jgari lefo'a grana .e lefo'a mapku .i le zdacravro .e le cmaroi kacplu .e le crane folbimvrocu kandi selzga velplu sepa'u lefo'a xalni nu ze'o bajra .i lo relxilma'e sazri noi ke'a klama fo le dargu cu bainerbi'o le spabi'u mu'i lenu zu'i rivbi lo bazi nu janli

.i lu vi stuzi mi'a doi lami dirba seisa'a se bacru be le bevri be le blabi cavykosta be'o noi ke'a nerkla fo lecanko se'u noi ke'a piso'imei cimdre selgai .i ku'i piso'e le cimdre cu sudga .i ma sukybajykla le bartu ca lenu mi'avi klama li'u

.i lu fo'a goi lo traji nalfadni nanmu po'u la mestr. natl. cu go'i seisa'a se bacru be la mezyz. sepltn. .i putavla fi leri nunbi'a .enai lo drata gi'e sukli'a secau lo litli'avla .a lo xervla ca lenu do vi klama .i lakne jinvilenu fo'a pu viska lo ru'ipre li'u

.i lu mi stidi lenu le pangerku cu mukti seisa'a seke smaci'o bacru le tunbyti'u .i fo'a fi mi skicu fe lenu fo'acamte'a loi gerku .i paroiku fo'a seke jersi kalte vazaive'a lo mrofoi pe vi le ri'emla be la ganjiz. fe lo cilce gerkugirzu .i fo la'edi'u nitcu fa fo'a fe lenu caze'a le nicte cu stali vizi lo ninselkakpa mroke'a va'o lenu lei gerku cagekyki'a gi'e jdecisma gi'e sputu vau ve'ijega'u fo'a .i la'ede'u cu banzu lenu roda xalni li'u .i leka finti loi cizra lisri ze'i lo cmalu temci cu ka fo'e se certu steci

Translations of le lojbo se ciska

Self-Description by T. Peter Park

coi pendo
Hello friends

.i mi du la tipitr. park. poi cnino lojbytadni
I am T. Peter Park who is a new Lojban-student.


ni'o mi ckuzdacertu je bancertu je circertu .i mi gunka vi le ckuzda po'e la linbruk. pe vi la cladaplus. .i puzuze'uku mi tadni le nintei ropno citri vi le balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .i lemi ralju naljibri nu gasnu cu zu'o tadni le prijypenla'u .e loi bangu .i mi pu'i tavla gi'a tcidu vau la gliban. .e la .estyban. .e la frasyban. .e la tcoban. .e la spanban. .e la portyban. .e la .italban. .e la sfedban. .e la ruskyban. .i mi steci nelci lezu'o tadni la lojban. .i mi mutce nelci loinu kasta'a noi kansa loi menli .a zdile prenu
I am a librarian (book-house-expert), linguist (language-expert), and historian (history-expert). I work in the library (book-house) of Lynbrook on Long Island. A long time ago for a long time I studied modern (new-time) European history at the University (great-school) of Virginia. My principal hobbies (non-job activities) are studying philosophy (wise-thinking-art) and languages. I can speak and/or read English, Estonian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, and Russian. I especially like studying Lojban. I very much enjoy conversation with intelligent and/or amusing people.

ni'o mi pu jbena la .erix. park. .e la .ilmen. park. ca la pasovopananc. vi la .estis. noi pucaze'a sepli gugde gi'e caca pagbu le softo badyjecta .i mi capu xabju la .iunaitydsteits. zai la pasovobinanc. .i mi capu tadni vi le slacitcu'e po'e la linbruk. .e le balcu'e po'u la .adelfais. .e le su'ore balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .e la MERiland. .i mi pu tadni le ckuzdaske vi le balcu'e po'e la MERiland.
I was born to Erich and Ilme Park in 1941 (the date 1941) in Estonia, which was for some time a separate country and is now part of the Soviet Megastate (big-polity). I have dwelt in the United States since 1948 (the date 1948). I have studied in the high school (older-young-school) of Lynbrook, the college (great-school) named Adelphi, and the universities (great-schools) of Virginia and Maryland. I studied library science at the University (great-school) of Maryland.

ni'o mi capu ciska re lojbyciksi torselcusku
I have written two Lojban-explaining articles (short-discourses, brief-expressions).

co'o
Good-bye!


A letter to Marcia Greenough by T. Peter Park

coi marcan.
Hello, Marcia!

.i mi du la tipitr. park.
I am the one called T. Peter Park.

ni'o lemi nu penmi do ca le midydeisa'i noi pu kansa la krtis. bruks. cu mutce pluka mi .i mi mutce nelci loinu kasta'a noi kansa lei menli prenu
My act of meeting you at the midday-meal (lunch), which incidentally was with the one called Curtis Brooks, very much pleased me. I very much like all the acts of talking-together (conversation) which incidentally are with some of the intelligent people.

ni'o mi ckuzdacertu gi'e bancertu gi'e circertu .i mi gunka vi le ckuzda po'e la linbruk. pe vi la cladaplun. .i pu tadni loi nintei ropno citri vi le balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .i lemi ralju naljibri nu gasnu cu zu'o bantadni .i mi steci nelci lezu'o tadni la lojban.
I am a book-house-expert (librarian), a language-expert (linguist), and a history-expert (historian). I work in the book-house (library) of Lynbrook on the Long-Island. I studied new-time (modern) European history in the great-school (university) of Virginia. My principal un-job activity of doing (hobby) is the activity of language-study (linguistics). I particularly enjoy the activity of studying the one called Lojban.

.i .e'o ko dunda lemi nu rinsa kei la kyrtis. .e la djak. danyvan.
Please give my acts of greeting to the one called Curtis and the one called Jack Donovan.

.i mi du la pitr.
I am the one called Peter.


Two letters to Deb Wunder by T. Peter Park

coi deb.
Hello, Deb!

.i mi du la tipitr. park. .i mi ckuzdacertu gi'e bancertu gi'e circertu .i mi gunka vi le ckuzda po'e la linbruk. pe vi la cladaplus. .i mi pu tadni loi nintei ropno citri vi le balcu'e po'e la virdjinian. .i lemi ralju naljibri nu gasnu cu zu'o bantadni
I am the one called T. Peter Park. I am a book-house-expert (librarian), a language-expert (linguist), and a history- expert (historian). I work in the book-house (library) of Lynbrook on the Long-Island. I studied new-time (modern) European history in the great-school (university) of Virginia. My principal un-job activity of doing (hobby) is the activity of language-study (linguistics).

ni'o lemi'o nu fonkasta'a pu mutce pluka mi .i mi mutce nelci loi menli je zdile nu kasta'a
Our act of telephone-together-talking (phone conversation) much pleased me. I very much like intelligent and amusing acts of together-talking (conversation).

ni'o mi vi benji re jbociksi selsku do .i mi pu ciska ri .i .a'o ri ba pluka do
I send here two Lojban-explaining discourses to you. I wrote them and I hope they will please you.

.i mi du la pitr.
I am the one called Peter.


coi deb.
Hello, Deb!

.i mi pu mutce nelci lenu penmi do .ije mi pu mutce nelci lenu penmi la lojbab. .e la noras. .e la. .atlstan. .e la .abis. .e la .erik. TIdeman. .e la .art. .uiners. .e la morokos.
I very much liked the event of meeting you. And I very much liked the event of meeting "Loj-Bob," Nora, Athelstan, Abbie, Eric Tiedemann, Art Wieners, and Morocco.

ni'o ledo ka prenu cu mutce pluka mi
Your quality of person-ness very much pleases me.

ni'o .a'u mi djica lenu do lifri lo mutce gleki je melbi ke cizemoi bendei .i mi pacna lenu do lifri lo mutce gleki cizemoi nanca .ije mi pacna ledo naldu'e ka selzunti ledo malmensi
I want to wish you a very happy and beautiful 37th birthday. I hope for a very happy 37th year for you. And I hope for your not-too-much being-interfered-ness (condition of being bothered) on the part of your quote blankety-blank sister unquote.

ni'o mi du ledo pendo poi du la tipitr.
I am your friend who is called T. Peter.



From Genesis
by T. Peter Park, corrected by Bob

.i la cev. pu zbasu le tsani .e la ted. ca lenu cfari
God made the sky and the Earth during the act of initiating.
ni'o la cev. pu cusku
     lu .ai loi gusni ca cfari leka zasti li'u
.iseri'abo loi gusni puca cfari leka zasti
God said,
     "(I intend!) Light now begins the quality of existing".
And therefore light did then commence the property of existence.

An Original Science Fiction Story

by Jamie Bechtel

The italics are Bob's literal translation. The non-bold English text is Jamie's intended English equivalent. You can see for yourself how well he did, with only lessons through Lesson 6, no computer aided instruction, and learning on his own. The only errors in the version he sent me were some minor tense items he hadn't had lessons for (though he guessed well), and the substitutuion of "go'i" when "la'edi'u" was correct. I corrected these errors. His story was written before the last grammar change, I had to change "po'u" to "pe" in a couple of places as a result.

Jamie rewards us with a couple of very Lojbanic (as opposed to English) phrasings. Especially until we are established with an international speaker base, there will be a premium on writings which go beyond expressing things the way we do in English, and which use the features of Lojban to express things in ways difficult or impossible in other languages. This can involve non-English tanru, a feature of Michael Helsem's writings, or the turn of Lojban grammar that relates ideas using Lojbanic precepts. (The classic of the latter form was the translation of "A table has four legs", using the Lojbanic place structure for 'leg' to create the form "A table is be-legged by four somethings". In Lojban, this is "lo jubme cu se tuple vo da".)

Excellent work, Jamie!

loi dacti poi farlu le tsani
Objects that fall from the sky

mi pupu platu lenu viska lo skina poi se cmene be le latmo cmene be loi xirma .i lera cmene du zoa ekuus.
I had-planned the state of seeing a movie which is called the Latin name for Horse ... and its (the movie's) name is identical to 'ekuus'.
I had planned to see a movie called "Equus" (which is Latin for horse).

.i mi stali lemi kumfa ki'u lo vlipa ke bratu carvi .i mi tcidu lo cukta ki'u la'edi'u
I stay at my room because of some powerful hail-rain. I read a book because of this (my staying in my room.)
However, I stayed in my room because of a powerful hail storm. Because of this I read a book.

.i mi tirna lo cladu pe vi le gapru loldi .i mi bajra ra .i le savru krasi cu barda bratu .i ri pu farlu klama fo le drudi fi le tsani
I hear a loud (thing) which-is-associated-with at-the above-floor. I run to it (the noise). The noise origin is large hail. They (the hail) fallingly came via the roof (as a route) from the sky.
I heard a loud crash upstairs, and ran to it. Large hailstones were making the noise. They were falling through the roof.

.i mi cikre le drudi kalri
I fixed the roof-opening.
I patched the roof hole.

.i mi tirna lo du'e savru pe vi le danmo tubli
I hear some excessive noise which-is-associated-with at-the smoke-tube.
I heard noises from the chimney.

.i mi bajra le danmo tubli kalri gi'e zgana lo bratu .i mi na kakne lenu cikre kei mu'i leka tcima
I run to the smoke-tube opening and observe hail. I'm not-able at the event-of repairing, because of the weather-ness.
I ran to the chimney and saw hail-stones. I wasn't able to do repairs because of the weather.

.i savru vi le cnita loldi .i le savru cu na rarna .i mu'i la'edi'u mi cu terpa .i mi na birti catlu.
Noise, at-the below-floor! The noise is not-natural. Because of this (the un-naturalness of the noise), I fear. I un- certain-ly look at.
There's noises below. They aren't natural, and this scared me. I carefully looked.

.i lo dukse cizra prenu cu sanli ta .i ra dukse barda ke blabi kubli gi'e ponse lo dukse ni moklu.
An excessively-bizarre person stands there (on-that). It (the person) is an excessively-large type-of white-cube, and possesses excessive mouth-amounts.
A monster stood there. It was a giant white cube with many mouths.

.i ra pu farlu le tsani .i mi zgana lo drata ke cizra dacti poi farlu le tsani .i nalci since
It (the person) had fallen from-the sky. I observe some other type-of bizarre things that fall from-the sky. Wing- snakes.
It had fallen from the sky. I saw other weird things falling from the sky - winged snakes.

i pa lera moklu cu bacru lu ko na terpa .i le jmive ranji temci po'e ro lemi prenu cu mentu li paci .i mi na kakne lenu mi xrani li'u
One of its (the person's) mouths utters "(Imperative) You not-fear! The live-r continue time interval inalienably possessed by all my people is in minutes the number 13. I'm not-able at the-event-of me injuring."
One of its mouths spoke "Don't be scared. My kind only live 13 minutes. I can do you no harm".

.i mi cu se spaji lenu le cizra prenu cu cuksu fo la lojban
I am-surprised-by the-state-of the bizarre-person expressing in form/media Lojban.
I'm surprised the monster speaks Lojban.

.i le tcima cu manku ri'anai la gaicac.
The weather is dark not-justified-by that called 12-hour.
It's dark despite being noon.

ni'oni'o ve'a loi citri ku loi prenu pu viska loinu cizra dacti carvi .i loi prenu cu viska lonu banfi carvi .i lonu curnu carvi .i lonu lijda dacti carvi
Totally new subject. During medium-interval of the mass of history, the People saw Events of bizarre-things raining. People saw some-events-of amphibian-raining. Some-events-of worm-raining. Some-events-of religious-object raining.
Throughout history people have seen strange objects fall from the sky - frogs, worms, and religious objects.

ni'o mi puzu penmi lo tordu nanmu .i ri krici lu da poi loi prenu cu krici cu fasnu li'u .i lu la'edi'u ca na fasnu seja'e ma li'u se cpedu mi .i lu ma'a krici loi saske .enai loi lijda li'u
New subject. I long-ago met a short-man. He (the man) believed "Something which People believe in, occurs." "These (occurrings of what people believe in) now not-occur as-a-result-of what?" was requested by me. "We (me and you and others) believe in Science and-not Religion".
Long ago, I met a short man. He believed "Whatever people believe, happens". "Why don't weird things happen today?", I asked. "Because we believe in science, not religion.

ni'oni'o le cizra prenu cu morsi .i le since cu citka le morsi cizra .i ba la'edi'u le since cu gapci
Totally new subject. The bizarre person is dead. The snakes eat the dead bizarre (one). And-after-this (the eating), the snakes are gas.
The monster died. The snakes at the monster. Afterwards, the snakes evaporated.


A Re-translation of a Paragraph by JCB in Scientific American
by T. Peter Park

le le jenmi gidva goi ko'e ge'u girzu lidne goi ko'a pu cusku leko'a ka selpluka leko'a nu cusku le ko'a ka puzuzai djuno le fatci .i ko'a pu tsali cusku lu ko'e ia na tcica mi ri'anai leko'e nu troci li'u gi'e pu minde leko'e noi du zenono prenu ku'o ka pinfu leko'e kumfa

The Army-guides' (referred to as they2) group leader (referred to as he1) expressed his1 state of being pleased by his1 event of expressing his1 state of knowing long-past-time the facts. He1 forcefully said quote they2 certainly did not deceive me despite their2 event of trying unquote and ordered their2, who incidentally were 700 persons, state of being prisoners in their2 rooms.

Compare the Lojban with the 1960 Loglan version (which bears only slight resemblence to JCB's current version of the language):

le narmi glida grupa cefli pa sedbo koko da pa nu pluci po sedbo ko da papaca sazno le ri fekto.... ka ia no de mandu mi ka da forli sedbo ka nu nie de pa trati ka e pa djori senini de nu lakso vi le ru kruma pe de

The chief of the group of army guides said that he was pleased to say theat he had known the facts for a long time. "The certainly did not deceive me," he said forcefully, "even though they tried," and ordered seven hundred of them locked up in their rooms.


Roswell, New Mexico, 1947
by T. Peter Park

le varjenmi sonlidne goi ko'a pu skicu le seljanli volcukla ko'e goi le varsonci .e le skeprenu ku lo kensa marce gi'e pu skicu le ze morsi ke re'atra xadni poi pupu va se facki .i ko'a pu kajde ko'e lu lo ka jecta snura cu se sarcu lo ka mulno mipri noi srana ti li'u

The air-Army soldier-leader, referred to as "he1", described the crashed flying-disc to the air-soldiers and the science-persons, [both] referred to as "them2", as an outer-space vehicle, and described the seven dead type of human- form bodies which had been discovered there. He1 warned them2, quote, at least one state of polity security necessitates at least one state of being completely secret which incidentally pertains to this, unquote.

The Army Air Force officer described the crashed flying disc to the airmen and scientists (both "them") as a space-ship, and described the seven dead alien bodies which had been found there. He warned them, "National security requires complete secrecy which incidentally concerns this."

Bob comments: This is quite good. I want to point out a feature that contrasts what I said about Jamie's Lojbanic forms: T. Peter's use of "ti" in the last sentence. This is English usage, "malglico" as Nora calls it when she all to frequently catches me doing it. Yes, "ti" translates to "this" in English. But, "this" rarely translates to "ti" which is used only when pointing or otherwise indicating the referent. Unlike an English reader, the Lojbanist shouldn't presume what "ti" refers to in the story, and must examine the implausible as well as the plausible.


A Short Lesson in Office Politics
by T. Peter Park, corrected by Nora

tordu tadnyspi co srana lo pu'u briju selturni
Short study-piece which concerns that which is the process of office type being-governed
Short Lesson on Office Politics

ni'o loi jikcecmu senlanli noi la .erix. from. e la deivid. rizman. e la .arlin. rasel. xokcaild. mupli cu jinvi lenu lenu se cinmo seljitro fa loi jibgunka cu ralju mupli lo jikca nalzifre
The set of those who are social-community doubting-analysts who incidentally are by Erich Fromm and David Riesman and Arlie Russell Hochschild exemplified, think that the state of being emotionally controlled of the set of those who are job-workers is a principal example of that which is social type unfreedom.

.i le senlanli cu skicu leka bapli pe leka roroi cisma .e leka roroi pluka gasnu
These doubting-analysts describe the property of being compelled of the property of always smiling and the property of always pleasing acting.

.i le cukta poi se cmene lu nu camrivbi leka zifre li'u pe ci'a la from. ge'u .e lu le sepci'o so'irpre vau li'u pe ci'a la rizman. ge'u .e lu le seljitro risna po'a vau li'u pe ci'a la xokcaild. cu skicu gi'e senlanli vau le nalrarna ke cinmo nu jitro po'u ru
The books, defined as "the intense-avoidance of freedom" written by the one named Fromm and "the separate-feeling many-people" written by the one named Riesman and "the controlled heart (figurative)" by the one named Hochschild, describe and doubtingly-analyze this artificial-type emotion-control.

.i loi ta'e pluka gasnu ke briju je zarci gunka na'o klesi se fendi fi re frica girzu
The set of those who are pleasingly acting type office and market workers can typically be classifiedly divided into two different groups.

.i loi pamoi girzu gunka so'eroi xendo gasnu fi loi kansa gunka gi'e milxe pendo je sidju gasnu fi loi tervecnu .a loi selselfu
The set of those who are first group type workers usually kind act to the set of those who are accompanying workers, and moderately friendly and helpful act to the set of those being sold to and/or the set of those being served.

.i loi remoi girzu gunka roroi carmi pluka je pendo je cisma je clite simlu gasnu fi loi tervecnu .a loi selselfu gi'e so'iroi jursa je minde gasnu fi loi kansa gunka
The set of those who are second group type workers always intense-type pleasing and friendly and smiling and polite seeming act to the set of those being sold to and/or the set of those being served, and often harshly or commandingly act to the set of those who are accompanying workers.

.i loi pamoi girzu gunka cu traji vajni jinvi loi se cinmo be loi kansa gunka gi'e so'iroi milxe lanzu bo simsa jinvi sera'a loi kansa gunka
The set of those who are first group type workers superlatively important consider the feelings of the set of those who are accompanying workers, and often somewhat family-similar consider the set of those who are accompanying workers.

.i loi gunka po'u ra cu gungri cmima jundi gunka
These workers are work-group member(ly) attentive type workers.

.i loi remoi girzu gunka cu traji vajni jinvi loi terzukte fi le kagni gi'e lazni ja nalpendo jinvi sera'a loi ckamu carmi ke pluka je sutra ke'e gasnu gunka gi'e ckamu vajni jinvi sera'a le se cinmo be loi kansa gunka
The set of those who are second group type workers superlatively important consider the set of those that are goals of the company, and lazy and/or unfriendly consider the set of those that are less intensely pleasant-acting and/or less intensely fast-acting workers, and less important consider the feelings of the set of those that are accompanying workers.

.i pisu'o loi pamoi girzu gunka no'u loi gungri cmima jundi gunka ku mabla bo po'i ganxo bo cinba po'a je ke drata gunka bradi ke'e jinvi sera'a loi remoi girzu gunka
Some of the set of those who are first group type workers, which incidentally are the set of those who are work-group memberly attentive workers, derogatively anus-kissers (figurative) and other workers' type enemies consider the set of those who are second group type workers.


The idiomatic English:

Social critics like, for example, Erich Fromm, David Riesman and Arlie Russell Hochschild consider the emotional controlledness of employees a principal example of social unfreedom. They describe the compulsion to always be smiling and always act pleasingly. The books Escape from Freedom by From, The Lonely Crowd by Riesman, and The Managed Heart by Hochschild describe and criticize this artificial control of emotion.

Pleasantly acting office workers and salespeople can be classified in two different groups. Workers of the first group usually act kind to fellow-workers, and act moderately pleasing and helpful to customers and/or clients. Workers of the second group always act very pleasing, friendly, smiling, and polite to customers and/or clients, and often act harshly or bossily to fellow-workers. Workers of the first group consider their co-workers' feelings most important, and consider often co-workers somewhat similar to a family. They are workers internally oriented to the work-group. Workers of the second group consider the company's goals the most important, and regard less pleasingly-behaving or less fast-acting workers as lazy or unfriendly, and consider co-workers' feelings less important. Some of the first-group, or work-group internally-oriented, workers regard workers of the second group as ass-kissers and/or as enemies of other workers.


Bob: The English uses a lot of idiom that must not be translated literally into Lojban, which is one way in which T. Peter stumbled. For example, "The Managed Heart" has nothing to do with "risna", the Lojban word for "heart", and a figurative marker must be used, or better yet, the tanru "krastu co cilmo". T. Peter had also included "rutni" in his version of that title, based on the description of the book as describing artificial control of emotion. But the tanru "the artificially-controlled heart" sounds like a medical treatise on pacemakers. Always look at alternate in- terpretations of your writings. I believe that the Lojbanic communication philosophy should be: "A Lojban speaker is obligated to ensure against misunderstanding by any listener, including those from a culture other than that of the speaker." If a message is not understood because of a speaker's inaccuracy, non-specificity, or cultural assumption, it is the speaker's fault.

A related problem was with the phrase near the end "ass-kisser". The writer is not referring to a physical act - again a figurative marker is needed. But furthermore, in a culturally neutral language, you must NOT assume that even such as this is an insult. The mabla is mandatory.

Nora went for minimum change in correcting T. Peter. If I had been translating the piece, I would have been less literal in the translation, describing the behavior which causes one to be labelled with this derogative in an original Lojbanic tanru. I believe that all idiom should be similarly re-expressed, unless a premium is being put on exact matches with the original, in which case, Nora's solution is acceptable.

You-all have the right to disagree with me, of course, on these matters. I'm not running this show, the Lojban community is. So comments are welcome.


A Syllogism by Lewis Carroll
translated by Sylvia Rutiser

ro da poi na mulno leka melbi claxu ka'e se stuzi lo vitke se zdile kumfa
Each something that is complete in quality beautiful-lack are innately capable of being located at a visitor-amused room.

.i no da poi se jadni lo silna cu mulno leka sudga
No something which is adorned with some salt is complete in quality dryness.

.i no da poi na mulno leka na cilmo ka'e se stuzi lo vitke se zdile kumfa
No something which is not-complete in property non-moistness is innately capable of being located at a visitor-amused room.

.i ro da poi lumci minji cu se stuzi lo xamsi korbi
Each something that is-a-washing-machine is located at a sea-edge.

.i no da poi se zbasu fi lo calku jemna cu mulno leka melbi claxu
No something which is made from some shell-gems is complete in quality beautiful-lack.

.i ro da poi se stuzi lo xamsi korbi cu se jadni lo silna
Each something that is located at a sea-edge is adorned with some salt.


Bob's expansion and correction:

leflogji nabmi ci'a la lu,is. keral. vau
Symbol-logic problems, written by the one called Lewis Carroll.

ni'osa'a faisa'a
New topic (this is not really there) Continuing (this is not really there). [...]

ni'o de'e se cmima lo nalsucta jufra noi zo'e stidi lenu ke'a selru'a co nibypoi. .i lo se nibli cu se facki ko
New topic: The following are sets of not-abstract statements, such that, incidentally, someone suggests the-state-of their being-assumptions of-type logical-entailment-sequence. The logical conclusions are to-be-discovered by you (Imperative!).

ni'osa'a faisa'a
New topic (this is not really there) Continuing (this is not really there). [...]

ni'o muremo'o tu'e
New topic; (52) {

pamai ro da poi na mulno leka claxu loika melbi cu selcu'i co selra'e selstu lo vitke nunzdi kumfa
1. Each something which is not whole in the quality of lacking Beauty is-a-permitted-thing of-type retainedly-located-at a visitor-amusing room.

.ije remai no da poi se jadni lo silna cu su'oroi mulno leka sudga
(and) 2. No something which is-adorned-with some salt is at-least-some-times complete in quality dryness.

.ije cimai no da selcu'i .ei co selra'e selstu lo vitke nunzdi kumfa gi'enai mulno leka na cilmo
(and) 3. No something is-a permitted-thing (Obligation!) of-type retainedly-located-at a visitor-amusing room and-not [as well as not] is-complete in quality of non-moistness.

.ije vomai ro da poi jinru minji cu roroi selra'e selstu lo xamsi korbi
(and) 4. Each something which is-an-immerser-machine is-always retainedly-located-at a sea edge.

.ije mumai no da poi se zbasu fi lo calku jmepilka cu mulno leka claxu loika melbi
(and) 5. No something which is-made-from some shell gem-crust is complete in quality of lacking Beauty.

.ije xamai ro da poi selra'e selstu lo xamsi korbi cu bapu'i se jadni lo silna
(and) 6. Each something which is retainedly-located-at a sea-edge will-be-capable-of-and-have-already been-adorned-with some salt.

tu'u
}

ni'o ru'u roda dacti .ije ly .abu. du lu'elu mulno leka claxu loika melbi li'u .ije ly by. du lu'elu jinru minji li'u .ije ly cy. du lu'elu se jadni lo silna li'u .ije ly dy. du lu'elu selra'e selstu lo xamsi korbi li'u .ije ly .ebu. du lu'elu se zbasu fi lo calku jemna pilka li'u .ije ly xy. du lu'elu mulno leka sudga li'u seisa'a ri mintu leka sudga .ije ly ky. du lu'elu selcu'i co selra'e selstu lo vitke nunzdi kumfa li'u
New topic: (I assume!) Each something is a thing. (and) a = symbol-for "is complete in quality of lacking Beauty". (and) b = symbol-for "is-an-immerser-machine". (and) c = symbol-for "is-adorned-with some salt". (and) d = symbol-for "is retainedly-located-at a sea-edge". (and) e = symbol-for "is-made-from some shell gem-crust". (and) x = symbol-for "is-complete in quality of non-moistness" [editorial metalinguistic statement not really there: this (the quality of non-moistness) is the same as the quality of dryness.] (and) k = symbol-for "is-a-permitted-thing of-type retainedly-lo- cated-at a visitor-amusing room".

ni'osa'a faisa'a
New topic (this is not really there) Continuing (this is not really there). [...]

ni'o danfu
New topic: (Observative!) Answers.

.isa'a faisa'a
(this is not really there) Continuing (this is not really there). [...]

.i muremo'o ni'ida'uku ro da poi jinru minji cu na se zbasu fi le calku jemna pilka
(52) Necessitated by the-distant-preceding statements, each something which is-an-immerser-machine is-not made-from some shell gem-crust.


[Note, that in this translation, I had to improvise a way of expressing "[...]", or an indication of text omitted. We will probably add a discursive for this, which will be more explicit than the method I used in this translation.


And the original is:

Symbolic Logic, by Lewis Carroll

...

Sets of Concrete Propositions, proposed as Premises for Sorites. Conclusions to be found.

...

52

  1. Everything, not absolutely ugly, may be kept in a drawing-room;
  2. Nothing, that is encrusted with salt, is ever quite dry;
  3. Nothing should be kept in a drawing-room, unless it is free from damp;
  4. Bathing-machines are always kept near the sea;
  5. Nothing, that is made from mother-of-pearl, can be absolutely ugly;
  6. Whatever is kept near the sea gets encrusted with salt.

Univ. "things"; a = absolutely ugly; b = bathing machines; c = encrusted with salt; d = kept near the sea; e = made of mother-of-pearl; h = quite dry; k = things that may be kept in a drawing-room. [Bob: note that I didn't translate the "things that", which shouldn't have been there.]

...

Answers

...

52. Bathing machines are never made of mother-of-pearl.


The Open Window by Saki, translated by Athelstan

Struck-through words in the Lojban text are elidable terminator cmavo that are not required for grammaticality, but may have been included for clarity to the reader, or for stylistic reasons. Their inclusion does not change the meaning of the text. The first paragraph has been marked in accordance with our suggested directions, as an example of the procedure. The first few paragraphs of the English have been parenthesized to show Lojban bridi sub-sentences in the re-translation.


mele kalri canko ci'a la sakis. vau
Pertaining to the open window, written by the one called Saki.
The Open Window, by Saki

ni'oni'o lu lemi rirme'i bazi dizlo klama doi mestr.natl. li'u se bacru le clite ke jikca kufra citni'u noi ke'a li pamu cu nanca .i lu .ei do troci lenu do cabi'ibaxipa renvi lenu mi jikca li'u se bacru
[ni'oni'o "lu [lemi rirme'i bazi dizlo klama doi mestr.natl.] li'u" se bacru le clite ke jikca kufra citni'u noi <ke'a li pamu cu nanca >] [.i "lu [.ei do troci lenu {do cabi'ibaxipa renvi lenu {mi jikca}}] li'u" se bacru]
"My parental-sister will-shortly low-go, O Mr. Nuttel." is uttered by the polite, socially-comfortable young-woman such that (she is 15 years in duration). "(Obligation!) You attempt that (you now-till-later1 survive (my socializing))." is uttered.
"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and put up with me."


.i la fremtn.natl. goi fo'a troci lenu cusku le drani poi ke'a cu ge cusku pluka le cavizi tunbyti'u gi nake jikca xlali le bavizi rirme'i .i secau lenu fo'a cusku kei fo'a senpi lenu le porsi nu jikri'i vitke lei pu na penmi kei cu sidju le xanka ve mikce poi fo'a ca troci co se mikce
[.i la fremtn.natl. =goi= fo'a troci lenu {cusku le drani poi <ke'a cu ge [cusku pluka le cavizi tunbyti'u] gi [nake jikca xlali le bavizi rirme'i]>}] [.i secau lenu {fo'a cusku kei} fo'a senpi lenu {le porsi nu {jikri'i vitke lei pu na penmi kei} cu sidju le xanka ve mikce poi [fo'a ca troci co se mikce]}]
Framton Nuttel (he6) tries (to express the correct thing which is (both (expressingly-pleasing to the right-here-now sibling-daughter), and (not socially-bad for the future-right-here parent-sister))). Without (his6 expressing [it]), he6 doubts that (the sequential social-rite visiting to previous not-meeters helps the anxiety-conditions-treated-for which (he6 tries (to-be-treated-for))).
Framton Nuttel endeavored to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a suc- cession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

ni'o lu ru'a mi djuno ledo bavuza tcini li'u lefo'a goi le go'i ku mensi pupu se bacru mu'i lenu fo'a ca binxo co bredi lenu xabju klama le puxirejeva nurma ke snura stuzi .i lu do bava jikca najenai tavla su'o jmive prenu .i ledo ni xanka kei cu zenba ri'a lenu ranji badri .i da'i .ei mi ba dunda fi do fe lei pemydjuxa'a be fe ro leva prenu poi pu jikca se penmi mi .i su'o ri cu sei dei jetnu befi leimi se morji se'u pu mutce pluka li'u
ni'o ["lu [ru'a mi djuno ledo bavuza tcini] li'u" le <fo'a =goi= le go'i ku> mensi pupu se bacru mu'i lenu {fo'a ca binxo co bredi lenu {xabju klama le puxirejeva nurma ke snura stuzi}}] [.i "lu [do bava jikca najenai tavla su'o jmive prenu] [.i ledo ni {xanka kei} cu zenba ri'a lenu {ranji badri}] [.i da'i .ei mi ba dunda fi do fe lei pemydjuxa'a be fe ro leva prenu poi <pu jikca se penmi mi>] [.i su'o ri cu (sei dei jetnu befi leimi se morji se'u) pu mutce pluka] li'u"]
"(I suppose!) I know your future-around-yonder situation." his6 (the subject of the last sentence's) sister had- previously uttered with-motive-that (he6 was simultaneously a becomer of-type prepared-for the-event-of (dweller-going- to the past2-there rural secure-places)). "You will-there socialize-not and not talk-to at-least-some living-persons. Your amount-of (nervousness) increases caused-by being-(continually-sad). (Actually!) (Obligation!) I will give to-you the meeter-knower-letters to each of those-there persons which (socially-were-met-by me). At-least-some of-them (those- there persons) (This statement is true by-standard-of my remembrances) were much-pleasant-to."
"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice."

ni'o la fremtn. puxiso'e pensi lu xu la mezyz. sepltn. ne le ninmu poi fo'a dunda fi ke'a fe pa le pemdjuxa'a ku'o cu cmima lei pluka li'u
Framton pastmostly thought "Is it true that Mrs. Sappleton, the woman such-that he6 gives her one-of-the meeter- knower-letters, is-a-member-of the pleasant?"
Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.

.i lu xu do pu penmi so'i le viza prenu li'u preti fi le tunbyti'u mu'i lenu ri ca pajni leni na sance jikca kei le banzu
"Is-it-true-that you met with many-of-the close-to-here persons?" is-a-question-by the sibling-daughter motivated-by she (the sibling-daughter) simultaneously judges the-amount-of non-sound-socializing to-be the sufficient one.
"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

.i lu go'i ji'ino prenu li'u se bacru la fremtn. .i lu lemi mensi puviza xabju la REKtoris. pu le puzi nanca vomei .i ra pu dunda su'o pemdjuxa'a befe su'o le viza prenu li'u .i romoi jufra bacru ci'o lenu selbirti xenru
"It is true that (met-with) nearly-zero persons." is uttered by Framton. "My sister previously-close-to-here inhabited the Rectory, before the recent-past year-foursome. She (my sister) gave at-least-some meeter-knower-letters-to at- least-some-of-the close-to-here persons [to me]." (Observative.) Last-sentence utterer with-emotion the certainly-true regretting.
"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My sister was staying here, at the Rectory, you know, some four years ago and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here." He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.


.i lu ju'e do djuno le ji'inomei xu lemi rirme'i li'u ranji jmina preti se bacru le clite ke jikca kufra citni'u
"(I conclude!) You know the nearly-nothingsome (Is this true?) about my parental-sister," is a continuingly-additional question utterance by the polite type-of socializingly-comfortable toung-woman.
"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the self-possessed young lady.

.i lu go'i lo su'emei po'u lera cmene .e lera judri li'u tugni se danfu le vitke .i fo'a pensi kucli lenu la mezyz.sepltn. goi ko'u cu speni gi'a mroselspe .i da poi na kakne co se skicu zi'e pe le kumfa cu stidi leka nanmu xabju
"It is so (knowing-about) at-most-a-little-some which-is someone-earlier's (her = 'my parental-sister') name and her address," agreeably answers the visitor. He6 is-thinkingly-curious-about Mrs. Seppleton (her5) is married and/or deadly-bespoused. Something that is not-capable of-type being described and which-pertains-to-the room suggests man- inhabitant-ness.
"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An unidentifiable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.

.i lu leko'u goi ra banli betri cu fasnu puca le pu nanca be li ci seisa'a se cusku be le citno .i la'edi'u balvi lenu ledo mensi vi xabju li'u vau
"Her5 which is the-one-referred-to-earlier grand tragedy occurs before-during the past-years-duration of number 3 [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: expressed by the young one]. This (the occurance) is in-the-future of your sister here-inhabiting.
"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the child; "that would be since your sister's time."

.i lu ki'a leko'u betri vau li'u preti fi la framtn. .i ki'u da fo le vive'a surla nurma stuzi fa lei betri cu simlu lo fange
"Clarify: Her5 tragedy?" is-a-question by Framton. Justified by something, under-conditions-of the here-area relaxingly-rural place, tragedies seem-to-be strange things.
"Her tragedy" asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.

.i lu se lakne lenu do kucli lenu mu'i ma mi'a rinka lenu leva canko cu ranji le kalri kei le mela aktobr. lecysoltei li'u se bacru le tunbyti'u noi ke'a ca farja'o le barda fasyvroca'o noi lamji le saurfoi
"Probable-that you are being-curious about the-state-whereby: for-what-motive me-and-others cause (the there-window continuing-as the open one) under-conditions the October late-sun-time interval." is-uttered-by the sibling-daughter, who-incidentally she is direction-showing the large french-door-window which-is-incidentally adjacent-to the grassy- field.
"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened onto a lawn.

.i lu .i'e leni glare cu zmadu lo'e ni ca citsi glare seisa'a se cusku be la fremtn. .i ji'a xu le va canko fi da ckini fe le betri li'u vau
"(Reluctant acceptance!) The amount of warmth is more than the-typical amount-of present-season-warmth [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: expressed by Framton.]. Also-is-it-true: the there-window, by some relation, is-related-to the tragedy."
"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Framton; "but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?"

lu tai lenu va canko pagre ku cazi le satci cibnanca purci ku ko'a goi ge leko'u speni gi leko'u re citno bruna cu cliva zukte fi le leca djedi ku terdanti nunkalte
"By method of the there-window passing-through, right-at-the-time-of the exactly three-year before thing, they1, who are defined as both her5 spouse and her5 two young-brothers, leavingly-acted-with-purpose-of the the-then-day's projectile-firing event-of-hunting.

.i ko'a ko'a noroi xruti .i ca lenu ko'a cu ragve klama fo le rancimdre foldi fe leko'a selneirai ke cpirsnaipe katstu kei ro le cimei cu se ri'usrutu'o lo nurcau rancimderke'a
They1 themselves1 never returned. (They never returned themselves.) During the event of their1 across-going via the softly-moist-dirt field to their1 be-fond-most type of bird-snipe hunter-site, each-of the three-some is restrainingly-surrounding-swallowed by a secure-without softly-most-dirt-cavity.

.i ca le pu kufrydukti je carvi crisa sei se djuno se'u loi stuzi poi ke'a cu snura ca lei drata nanca cu suksa je nalseljde nalsarji .i leko'a xadni cu noroi se facki .i la'edi'u kufrydukti pagbu li'u
During the in-the-past comfortably-opposite and rainy summer (it is known) places which they are secure during other years are suddenly and not-warnedly non-supporters. Their1 bodies are never discovered. That (that their bodies are never discovered) is the uncomfortably-opposite part."

se bacru le tunbyti'u goi fo'e
is uttered by the sibling-daughter which defines she7.

.i le voksa be le citno cazi binxo co ckaji leka jikca kufra na.e leka ci'orja'o co dirsre remna .i fo'e bacru lu la selke'i rirme'i cu roroi krici lenu ko'a ba xruti ko'a ca lo ba djedi
The voice of the young one sometime-near-this becomes of-type characterized by socially-comfortable-ness-not and emotion-showingness of-type interruptingly-erringly human. She7 utters "Pitied Parent-Sister always believes that they1 will return themselves1 during some future day.

.i ko'a noi se kansa le cmalu je bunre pangerku poi ke'a se cirko fa'u lenu ke'a kansa ko'a cu dzukla levi nenri fo leva canko ta'i le purci po ko'a .i la'edi'u cu krinu lenu le canko cu kalri ranji fi ro le vanci pagbu pe ze'o le ctebixtei
They1, incidentally accompanied by the small and brown Spanish-dog (spaniel) that it is lost associated-with-event- of it accompanying them1, are walkingly-going to this-here inside via that-there window in-manner-of the past of theirs1. This (the walkingly-going) is-the-reason-for the window open-continuing during each of the evening-parts which-are until-the night-become-time-intervals.

.i la selke'i je selnei rirme'i goi ko'u puta'e tavla mi lesu'u cliva ne pu'e lenu ge leko'u speni goi ko'e cu kansa ponse leko'e blabi je jacnalgre gacko'a noi ke'a dandu leko'e birka gi la ranis. po'u leko'u citrai bruna goi ko'i cu sanga lu doi brtis. mu'i ma do plipe li'u noi roroi se sanga semu'i lenu zdifanza ko'u ku mu'i lenu ko'u xusra lenu le nunsanga cu fanza ko'u
Pitied-And-Liked Parental-Sister (her5) was-habitually talking to me about the nature of leaving which- incidentally-is of-the-process-of both {her5 spouse (him2) accompanyingly-possessing his2 white, water-not- penetrating, cover-coat, which-incidentally hangs-from his2 arm} and Ronnie, who-is her5 young-most brother (him3), singing, "O Bertie, with-what-motive, you leap?" which-incidentally always is-sung motivating the amusing-annoyance of her5, and motivated-by her5 asserting that the singing annoys her5.

[Bob: Yes - that was all one sentence. The English would be equally confusing to someone who didn't know the language. This one took a lot of work on Athelstan's, Nora's, and my part, to get it to both parse and match the English. Hopefully, few Lojban speakers will talk in the manner of this young lady. Given the difficulty of the sentence, let me show it properly grouped according to our method (Using subscripts in a sentence that is this complex may help you keep track of the pieces. While I'm not doing it, you can even subscript the sumti within each bridi so as to keep track of them.:
[.i la selke'i je selnei rirme'i =goi= ko'u puta'e tavla mi lesu'u {cliva} =ne= pu'e lenu {1ge <1leko'u speni =goi= ko'e cu kansa ponse leko'e blabi je jacnalgre gacko'a noi <2ke'a dandu leko'e birka>2>1 gi <3la ranis. =po'u= leko'u citrai bruna =goi= ko'i cu sanga "lu doi brtis. mu'i ma do plipe li'u" noi <4roroi se sanga semu'i lenu {zdifanza ko'u} ku mu'i lenu {ko'u xusra lenu {le nunsanga cu fanza ko'u}}>4>3}1] Did that help? No? Oh well! It will eventually make sense.]

.i sei ko djuno be la'edei so'uroiku ca lei bifcau je smaji vanci poi ke'a simsa ti ku'o mi piso'aroi pencauji'i lenu ro ko'a ba dzugre leva canko li'u
(Know the-referent-of-this-statement!) At-least-some-times, during breeze-without, quiet, evenings that they (the evenings) are-similar-to this, I almost-always thinking-withoutly-opine-that the-event-of each-of-them will walkingly-penetrate that-there window."

"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two younger brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all en- gulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it." Here the child's voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. "Poor Aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear Aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing, 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window--".

ni'o fo'e sisti tai lo cmalu nu desku .i la fremtn. surlybi'o va'o lenu le rirme'i cu so'irzu'edzukla le kumfa nenri tai lo gunma be loi xernuncru pe mu'i lenu ko'u lerci lenu ko'u klama ti
She7 ceases in-the-manner-of small-shaking. Framton relaxingly-becomes under-conditions-of the parent-sister many- act-walk-going to the room-inside in-the-manner-of a mass of Regret-utterings which-are motivated-by her being late at going here.
She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.

.i lu mi pacna lenu la viras. capu zdile do li'u se bacru ko'u
"I hope Vera has been amusing-to you." is-uttered-by her5.
"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.


.i lu ra capu carmi cinri li'u se bacru la fremtn.
"The earlier-referent (she) has-been intensely-interesting." is uttered by Framton.
"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

.i lu mi pacna lenu do na se fanza le kalri canko seisa'a sutra se bacru be la mezyz. sepltn. .i lemi speni ce bruna goi ko'a cu zvati le selxa'u bazi leinu seldantysazri .i ko'a roroi nerkla fo ta .i ko'a pu bartu ca lei cimynalsai foldi seni'i lenu ko'a ba galfi fi lo naljinsa kalsa fe lemi selke'i lolbu'u .i simsa leka medo po'u loi nanmu kei vau xu li'u vau
"I hope that you are-not-annoyed-by the open-window [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: quickly-is-uttered-by Mrs. Seppleton]. My {spouse, brothers} (they1) are-at the-place-of-habitation immediately-after the projectile-firer-operations. They1 always in-come vi'a that-there. They1 were outside during the moist-non- supporting-fields logically-necessitating-that they1 will modify, into non-clean chaos, my pitied floor-cloth. (Observative!) Similar-to the-qualities which pertain-to you-who-are-Man. (Is this sentence true?)
"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you menfolk, isn't it?"

.i ko'u gleki rajyta'a fi leinu seldantysazri .e le cipni ka so'umei .e leka cumki loi datka ca le dunra .i ga'a la fremtn. goi fo'a la'edi'u curve ka nalpu'a .i fo'a camtcu je su'episo'emei bo snada troci lenu fo'a galfi lenu terta'a kei lo mroru'i ckamu nu terta'a .i fo'a sanji lenu lefo'a selvi'e capu su'episo'umei jundi kei .e lenu leko'u kanla ru'i midyctarmu'u fo fo'a fi le kalri canko .e levu saurfoi .i fo'a birti lenu lefo'a vitke pe ca leca betri nacykefydei cu xlafunca cunkemdimnyfau
She5 happily continue-talks about the projectile-firer-operations and the bird few-some-ness and the possibility of Duck during the winter. To-observer Framton (he6), this (the happily-continue-talking) is pure unpleasantness. He6 intensely-needs, and at-most-mostly succeedingly, tries that he6 modifies the subject-talking-about into some dead- spiritually-less subject-talking-about. He6 is-conscious-of his6 host has-been at-most-a-little attending and her5 eyes continuously middle-look-moving from him to the open window and the-yonder grass-fields. He6 is certain that his6 visit that is-during the-present tragedy year-recurring-day is a-bad-luck random-type-of-fate-occurance.
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk onto a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.

.i lu lei mikce cu tugni ri lenu ri mikce mi fo lonu mulno surla .e lonu menli ci'ordu'e claxu .e lonu mi rivbi roda poi simsa lonu vlile slugu'a li'u nuzba fi la fremtn. noi ke'a cu jinvi le su'episo'imei kampu jifselkri po'u lenu loi roroi penmi .e loi paroi cunpenmi cu nuzyxagji ro lo cmalu tcila be lei terbi'a .e lei termikce .e leiri rinka je velmikce .i lu sera'a lemi ctipla ru cu na mutce tugni li'u se mi'acru fo'a
"The doctors agree with themselves that they treat me by complete-relaxing and mental emotional-excess being-without and my avoiding all-somethings which are-similar-to violent muscle-working." is-news according-to Framton, who opines the at-most-much-somely-common false-belief which-is-that Never-Meeter and Once Chance-Meeter is news-hungry-for all small- details of the illnesses and their (the illnesses) causes and treatments. "Pertaining-to my eater-plan, the much- earlier-mentioned not-muchly-agree" is additionally-said by him6.
"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.

.i lu xu na go'i li'u se bacru la mezyz. sepltn. sepi'o lo voksa poi cazi basti lo nalselcni nunva'u .i ko'u suksa lenu binxo lo cikna jundi .i go'i mu'inai le se bacru be la fremtn.
"Is-it-true-that not-this (the not-much-agreement) is so." is uttered by Mrs. Seppleton, using a voice that just-then replaces a not-interested breath. She5 is sudden in becoming an alert-attender. This (the sudden becoming) is not- motivated-by the utterance of Framton.
"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention -- but not to what Framton was saying.

.i lu ko'a vize'o klama ca .uo ku seisa'a se laucru be ko'u se'u cazi le tcatytei .i .ienaipei ko'a simsa zo'e poi ke'a cimdre se gacri ji'e le kanla li'u vau
"They1 here-approachingly come now (Completion!) [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: is- loudly-uttered-by Mrs. Sappleton], just-at the tea-time. (Don't you agree?) that they1 are-similar-to some-thing(s)- unspecified such-that they moist-dirtily are-covered up-to-limit the eye(s)."
"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"

.i la fremtn. piso'umei desku ri gi'e carna zu'i le tunbyti'u sekai leka firsku poi se djica fo'a lenu cusku leka ci'orkansa jimpe .i le citno cu caicta da pe vije'oza le kalri canko sekai leka lo cfipu ka teprai cu se jarco lefo'e kanla .i sekai leka lenku jenca co velskicycau nunte'a ku la fremtn. carna le seltse gi'e catlu fa'a le se go'i
Framton a-bit-ly shakes himself and rotates-around the-typical-axis in-the-direction-of the sibling-daughter, characterized-by facial-expressive-ness which is-desired-by him6 for expressing emotionally-together-with understanding- ness. The young one intense-looks at something a-medium-ways-beyond-the-location-of the open window, characterized-by the nature-of a confused quality of fear-extreme being-shown-by her7 eyes. Characterized by cold-shockness of-type description-without fear, Framton turns on-axis the sat-upon and looked in-the-direction-of it (that which is intensely- looked at by the young one).
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.

.i va'o le manbi'o vanci ku lo ci remtra goi ko'a cu dzukla fo le saurfoi vazai le canko .i roda po'u pa le cimei cu bevri lo terdanti seni'a leda birka .i pa le cimei cu mi'arbe'i lo blabi kosta noi dandu leri janco .i lo tatpi ke bunre pangerku ca vazi ranji leko'a jafti'e .i sekai leka sancau ku ko'a jbibi'o le zdani .i lo ruble je citno voksa cu sagysku ra'i lei manku fe lu mi pu cusku lu doi brtis. mu'i ma do plipe li'u li'u
In environment the dark-becoming evening, three human-forms (they1) walkingly-come via the grassy-field towards-near the window. Each-something which-is one-of the three carries a gun which-has-underneath its arm. One-of the three additionally-carries a white-coat, which hangs from its (the one-of-the-three's) shoulder. A tired type-of brown Spanish-dog simultaneously near-there continues-at-being their1 foot-behind thing. Characterized by sound-without-ness, they1 near-become to the nest. A weak, young, voice singingly-expresses, from-source the dark, "I said 'O Bertie, with- what-motive, you leap?'."
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close to their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound?"

.i la fremtn. cilce jgari lefo'a grana .e lefo'a mapku .i le zdacravro .e le cmaroi kacplu .e le crane folbimvro cu kandi selzga velplu sepa'u lefo'a xalni nu ze'o bajra .i lo relxilma'e sazri noi ke'a klama fo le dargu cu bai nerbi'o le spabi'u mu'i lenu zu'i rivbi lo bazi nu janli
Framton wildly-grasps his6 rod and his6 cap. The nest-front-door, the small-rock car-route, and the front field-wall- door, dimly observed route-points which-are-parts-of his6 panicky away-running. A two-wheeled-vehicle operator who is going along the road forcedly inside-becomes the plant-wall motivated-by the typical-one's avoiding of an imminent collision.
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.

.i lu vi stuzi mi'a doi lami dirba seisa'a se bacru be le bevri be le blabi cavykosta be'o noi ke'a nerkla fo le canko se'u noi ke'a piso'imei cimdre selgai .i ku'i piso'e le cimdre cu sudga .i ma sukybajykla le bartu ca lenu mi'a vi klama li'u
"Here sited are me-and-others, O My Dear." [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: is-uttered- by the carrier-of the white rain-coat, who in-comes via the window], who are much-ly moist-dirt-ly covered. In contrast, most-of the moist-dirt is dry. What suddenly-runningly-goes to-the outside during me-and-others at-here coming?"
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window; "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?"

.i lu fo'a goi lo traji nalfadni nanmu po'u la mestr. natl. cu go'i seisa'a se bacru be la mezyz. sepltn. .i pu tavla fi leri nunbi'a .enai lo drata gi'e sukli'a secau lo litli'avla .a lo xervla ca lenu do vi klama .i lakne jinvi lenu fo'a pu viska lo ru'ipre li'u
"(He6 who is) a most not-ordinary man who is the-one-called Mr. Nuttel did (suddenly-runningly-go) [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: is-uttered-by Mrs. Sappleton]. (Observative!) Talked about his (Mr. Nuttel's) illnesses and-not another-thing, and suddenly-left without <some polite-leaver-words or some regret-words> when you at-here come. (Observative!) Probably-opinion-holder that he6 saw a spirit-person."
"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."

.i lu mi stidi lenu le pangerku cu mukti seisa'a seke smaci'o bacru le tunbyti'u .i fo'a fi mi skicu fe lenu fo'a camte'a loi gerku .i paroiku fo'a seke jersi kalte vazaive'a lo mrofoi pe vi le ri'emla be la ganjiz. fe lo cilce gerku girzu .i fo la'edi'u nitcu fa fo'a fe lenu caze'a le nicte cu stali vizi lo ninselkakpa mroke'a va'o lenu lei gerku ca gekyki'a gi'e jdecisma gi'e sputu vau ve'ijega'u fo'a .i la'ede'u cu banzu lenu roda xalni li'u
"I suggest that the Spanish-dog motivates [metalinguisitic narrative/editorial insert not actually quoted: is-uttered- by-quiet-utterer the sibling-daughter]. He6, to me, described that he intense fears Dog. Once, he6 is chasingly- hunted, near-into-over-a-medium-interval a dead-field which-is at the river-beside of the Ganges, by a wild-dog group. Under these (being chasingly-hunted) conditions, needed he6 to during-through the-night to stay right-in a newly-dug dead-hole in-environment the dogs then dog-crying and warn-smiling and spitting in-small-area-and-above him6. These (the events just described) suffice-for all someones to panic.
"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve."

.i leka finti loi cizra lisri ze'i lo cmalu temci cu ka fo'e se certu steci
The quality of inventiveness in bizarre stories smally-within small-time-intervals, is-the-nature-of her7 expert- special-ness.
Romance at short notice was her speciality.


Letters, Comments, and Responses

from Greg Higley

...

In lesson 4A, page 9, your usage is not only illogical and ultimately ambiguous, but based upon analogous English structures which are just as ambiguous.

...

It is possible to make sentences in Lojban that are grammatically valid but semantically meaningless: mi klama lobridi. A meaning might be conceivable for this sentence, but would it have any relevance? The point I am trying to make is this: For the Lojban grammar to be valid, all sumti must be treated equally. (the 'symmetry principle')


Commencing further, we must assume that any sumti must have the same grammar after a sumti tcita cmavo, because the grammar must transcend meaning in order to be unambiguous. You have used the sumti tcita cmavo in a way that violates those standards.

Apparently - according to your usage - there are two distinct ways that a sumti can be treated after "ba", "ca", and "pu". The first way is to define the tagged sumti as being an event temporarily relative to the modified bridi. In other words, the modified bridi is 'marked' as occurring before, after, or at the same time as the tagged sumti.

The other way is to treat the tagged sumti as having some kind of implicit structure parallel to that of the modified bridi. An example:

mi klama pu la djan.

which is assumed to be:

mi klama pu lenu la djan. klama

The tagged sumti is presumed to be parallel to the x1 sumti of the same bridi. But this leads to some problems. Look at the following:

mi klama pu le ritli

If we treat this sentence as being analogous to the first example, above - and we must do this to maintain the wall between semantics and grammar - then we must assume it to be elliptically representing:

mi klama pu lenu le ritli cu klama
I go before the ritual goes

This leads to some confusion. We could imagine a ritual going somewhere - a collection of people which I'm describing as a 'ritual' going to some destination from some location, etc. But this is not what I'm trying to say. I mean that my act of going occurs before the ritual OCCURS (not 'goes'). I am not suggesting anything about the motion of the ritual, but "mi klama pu le ritli is clearly open to that interpretation based upon your usage. How do I know when there IS an implicit structure and when there is NOT one?

The only way to remove this ambiguity without adding new cmavo to represent implicit parallel structures is to use 'full' phrases such as "mi klama pu lenu la djan. klama" instead of the unstable logic of "mi klama pu la djan."


Bob responds: Of course Greg is right. The examples on that page and a couple places elsewhere in Lesson 4 are malglico. "mi klama pu la djan." must mean that "I go before 'the thing called John' occurs", which is an unlikely statement though potentially meaningful. Greg's proposed alternative, "mi klama pu lenu la djan. klama", is a correct phrasing, though not the only one. You need to study Lesson 5 to get the shorter "mi ne pu la djan. klama" ("I, before John, go."). Another, nearly identical statement is: "mi .ebabo la djan. klama" ("I, and later John, go.").

Greg's argument of symmetry is not relevant. Symmetry is an aesthetic principle, not a linguistic one. Most languages fail the symmetry test, and we have not made it a factor in Lojban design.

Also, all questions regarding the interpretation of a grammatical string in Lojban are considered semantic questions. Lojban is grammatically unambiguous in that its grammar, defined as the set of rules that generate all valid strings, is so constructed that no string can be generated by two different applications of the rules. Loj- ban's grammar is not defined as a transformational grammar, and sentences that mean the same thing are semantically equivalent, not grammatically so. Thus my last expression of his example, using ".ebabo" is not grammatically equiva- lent to the others, even if semantically so.

Notwithstanding all this, Greg, who asked this question within a few weeks of receiving the lessons, has contributed by finding an error that others with more experience have missed. This is why 75 of you have the lessons already, before we publish the textbook. We need your help to catch our errors and confusing explanations.

You needn't be expert in the language to point out that something doesn't make sense to you.


Greg asked a couple of other questions in his letter. He asks about the interpretation of such sentences as:

"mi viska le nanmu vi lei so'i tricu"
I see the man among the-mass-of many trees.

He asks whether this means that the observer is in the trees, the man, or both. The answer, implied by the same argument he used above, is that the event of seeing takes place in the trees (which probably but not necessarily implies that both are there). The other interpretations are expressed as:

"mi viska le nanmu ne vi lei so'i tricu"
I see the man who is among the-mass-of many trees

and:

"mi ne vi lei so'i tricu cu viska le nanmu"
I, among the-mass-of many trees, see the man.

This is also covered in Lesson 5, though I'm not sure how clearly.


Greg also asks how to translate something such as "The sun moves across the sky." which is a false statement in our physical world, but is apparently true to a non- educated observer.

There are a couple of answers to this one. The 'observational' discursive "za'a" indicates that the statement is made as a result of personal observation. This could be made explicit as "mi zgana lenu le solri cu klama fo le tsani se ragve" (I observe that the sun is a go-er via route the sky acrossed-thing.) which puts the movement in a "lenu" clause; these latter are slippery in truth determination, since anything using the article "le" refers to something by description. If I describe a cat sitting in my lap as "lenu le solri cu klama fo le tsani se ragve" in the above statement, the statement is true if I observed the cat in my lap, and the sun is totally irrelevant.

A third way, which avoids such nonsense, is to use "simsa" as the selbri, to make the apparentness explicit. Then it doesn't matter whether you use "lenu" or "lonu" to describe the sun's motion - the claim is the appearance of the motion, not the motion.

from various people on '

We've had a variety of comments on the ', which fall into two categories. Most such remarks ask us to drop it, or use the letter 'h' to stand for it. Indeed we do so in the machine grammar, which is written according to C program- ming language conventions. Not surprisingly, all of those who have proposed deleting the ' are C programmers. One of the arguments raised is in fact that C doesn't consider the ' to be alphabetic. It has also been pointed out that the ' is used to represent a glottal stop in Arabic, which is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to convey with the mark in Lojban (you cannot put a pause or a glottal stop where an ' occurs between two vowels.

There are several arguments for our current practice.

  1. The ' is a buffering sound which is not a consonant insofar as the morphology is concerned. For people (as opposed to computers) to learn the language, it is nice to have the generalization that cmavo are of the forms CV, CVV, and CV'V. Since most people (as opposed to computers) think of 'h' as a consonant, using 'h' would make these basic patterns harder to recognize, and the rule harder to teach.
  2. Since ' is a buffering sound that is primarily a pronunciation guide, it should look like the other pronunciation guide lerfu, which are . and , Remember that none of these are punctuation marks.
  3. If we used 'h', people would get the idea that you can use it for Lojbanizing any English 'h', anywhere you can use any other letter. This is also not true. ' can only go between two vowels. Thus Michael Helsem's name must be Lojbanized as xelsem. or .elsem. and not as *'elsem. The reason why we left 'h' out of the regular Lojban alphabet is that there are many languages, including French, where the sound will not be heard except possibly between two vowels. We also have to avoid confusion with the similar 'x'.


Note that, if a native language speaker has difficulty with the 'h' sound, they are permitted to use another non-Lojban unvoiced consonant instead; the most likely such choice is the /th/ of "thistle". There have been questions as to why we do not have this sound in our alphabet. One reason is its relative infrequencies among non-English languages; the other is this use as an alternative to 'h' for '.

  1. Actually, since the Arabic alphabet is not the Roman alphabet, the glottal stop in Arabic is not represented by an apostrophe - although indeed the Arabic letter looks like one. On the other hand, the Greeks, who after all invented the word, use the apostrophe for none other than the 'rough breathing' sound, and in a roughly similar context.


The other issue affecting the ' is its effect on stress syllable determination. Tommy Whitlock, who was involved in our original decision to add the ', has proposed that the two syllables divided by an ' be treated as one syllable for determining penultimate stress. He reasons that we were using the ' primarily to create a recognizable diphthong of sounds that normally are not stable as diphthongs. Thus "a'a", without the ', would be indistinguishable from "a" in some contexts.

Tommy is right about the original motive for ', but Nora, Athelstan, and Bob are all opposed to this change. One reason is that it is a change to the baseline to fix "what isn't broken" - there is no clear problem with what we have. More importantly, it has been pointed out that stressed syllables would not necessarily be any easier to say, or to pick out of the speech stream, and in fact, the change could result in unstable phonetics.

The advantage would be in recognizing a word like "ga'unrai" (gah-HOON-rai) = "highest", where the stress on the /'un/ syllable makes the components unrecognizable. By Tommy's proposal, the /ga'u/ would be treated as a single syllable for stress determination (GAH-HOON-rai); both 'syllables' would be equally stressed. The advantage is also its disadvantage. Linguistically, it seems likely that Tommy's "ga'unrai" and "gaurai" (GAUN-rai)= "doing- most" would be likely to degenerate together. Even worse would be a word like "ci'abra" (shee-HAH-brah) = writing- apparatus, which would be pronounced (SHEE-HAH-brah) under Tommy's proposal. I find it difficult to say this word, stressing both adjacent syllables, and not turn the final vowel into that English nemesis, the schwa.

Debate is welcome on these points, and other proposals are welcome, too. However, better justification will be required in order to increase enthusiasm for a potential change.


How Many gismu Does Loglan Need?

by Jeff Prothero

Bob's note: Jeff's original used a lot of jargon from earlier periods in Loglan history; I have updated these terms to the current Lojban words to minimize confusion on his key points. However, it is clear that Jeff is attempting to make a statement not just limited to our Lojban efforts.


Loglan was crafted in the 1950s. Like any good craftsman, Jim Brown looked at the best designs he knew of (European languages and logic notation, mostly), took the intuitively pleasing features from each, and tried to combine them to produce something workable. The result could fairly be characterized as the first human language worth criticizing.

Three decades later, craftsmen have largely been replaced by engineers, who are inclined to replace rule-of-thumb imitation by design and analysis from fundamental principles whenever possible. If human language design were an engineering discipline, what fundamental principles would language engineers work from? What sort of characteristics would they try to optimize? How close to optimum are current designs? Let's take a shot at imagining how such an engineer would tackle a specific issue such as design of the gismu vocabulary. Even more specifically, what is the optimum number of words in such a vocabulary?

Any sort of precise analysis requires some precise assumptions, typically oversimplified and somewhat arbitrary. We need to decide what the function of the gismu vocabulary is, and what measure we are trying to optimize. Let us concentrate on the rafsi system, and suppose that the purpose of the gismu vocabulary is to provide the building blocks for the lujvo vocabulary: Loglan's thousand-odd gismu serve to provide mnemonic names for the tens of thousands of words which (will eventually) form the working vocabulary of the loglanist. For lack of a better idea, we may suppose that the criterion to be optimized is the time required for a student of the language to learn the gismu vocabulary, and we may further assume that this learning time is proportional to the number of words in the gismu vocabulary. That is, we assume that, everything else being equal, the fewer gismu the student has to learn, the better. How many gismu do we really need?

Clearly, we need a clear notion of the function of the gismu set. What's in a name? In a word: a mnemonic. A loglan lujvo certainly does not define the concept it labels, but is does classify that concept. The set of gismu do not constitute a basis vector set spanning concept space, but they do provide a Dewey Decimal System cataloguing concept space. In essence, the gismu set provides a coordinate system for concept space. The lujvo name we assign a loglan concept does not identify the exact position of that concept in concept space, but it does identify the general area it lives in.

That seems to answer the qualitative question of what the gismu set does, but leaves in its wake a corresponding quantitative question: How fine a map of concept space do we need? This is an empirical question, and demands an empirical answer. One way of approaching this is by exam- ining the current loglan vocabulary, which represents the result of a practical investigation of this question stretching back at least as far as Basic English, with its vocabulary of approximately 850 words.

The overwhelming majority of loglan lujvo contain two rafsi selected from a gismu list of roughly 1000 choices. 1,000 * 1,000 = 1,000,000 -- the current gismu set is used to map concept space into about a million regions. Another line of evidence comes from the game of Twenty Questions, in which player A is allowed twenty yes/no questions to identify something selected in advance by player B. Countless hours invested in this game have settled on twenty questions as a fair number to identify an arbitrary object. Twenty yes/no questions (twenty bits of information) suffice to distinguish two to the tenth objects, suggesting a concept space of size 1,048,576. Clearly, the agreement of these two lines of reasoning to within four percent is due more to chance than skill! But this same agreement does give us some confidence that the required resolution of our map of concept space is on the order of one million regions.

So we have reduced our question to: How many gismu are needed to map concept space into one million distinct regions? We presume the map is built by assigning each gismu some portion of concept space, and then intersecting these regions. The answer turns out to depend on how we pick our gismu. The smaller your tiles are, the more tiles it takes to tile a given room. In vaguely similar fashion, the more specific each gismu is, the more gismu you need to provide the required million regions.

Without getting too far into information theory, we can note that the ideal solution consists of twenty mutually orthogonal gismu, each (like yin/yang) covering about half of concept space. By allowing all combinations of these twenty gismu, we would generate the required million potential lujvo. Each lujvo would, on the average, contain half (ten) of the gismu, so the current concatenate-the-gismu style of lujvo construction would not be practical -- if each gismu were assigned a Consonant-Vowel sequence, the average lujvo word would run to ten syllables! This is a trivial problem -- it is easy to construct a positional bit-string encoding which will reduce the average lujvo to two syllables.

The interesting problem is finding a satisfactory set of twenty lujvo. Each must be much more general than any of the current set of lujvo -- each must cover about half of conceptual space. The Chinese (?) concept of yin/yang is a good starting point. Everything, but everything, seems to be either yin or yang, about half each way. One needs twenty such concepts, linearly independent of each other. The current set of 1000 gismu can be used as a development tool: One needs to find twenty concepts, each of which is TRUE of about half of the current gismu and FALSE of the remainder. These twenty concepts must be independent: given any two concepts A and B from the set, about a quarter of the 1000 current gismu should satisfy both A and B, about a quarter should satisfy A but not B, and so forth for the other two combinations.

If anyone makes any progress toward constructing such a twenty-gismu set, I would be delighted to hear about it.

In the meantime, we at least have a solid quantitative claim to make for loglan: its gismu list is at most fifty times harder to learn than is logically necessary!

Jeff Prothero
221 SW 153rd #194
Seattle, WA 98166 

Bob: Alas, I think Jeff is seeing making much from coincidences. The reason why about 1000 gismu exist in Lojban, Basic English, etc., is very simple; it is the round number closest in size to that of the 'basic' vocabulary needed to get by minimally in any foreign language, and thus demonstrated in history as being a reasonably learnable number of root words. To some extent also, there is feedback between word-lists. If someone generates a longer list, there is pressure to explain why there are more words needed than in the previous lists.

Jeff's analysis of semantic space as a bunch of categories, each with its own word, has been proposed by many people, but is not universally accepted as a paradigm. Words may be needed for larger areas of semantic space as well as smaller ones, and these spaces may need to overlap. But such an analysis is arguable as well.

The argument may be put more forcefully: while most individuals can use 20 questions to narrow down a concept in the game, this is a round number and hence to be reasonable. 10 questions is clearly too small; 30 would be too large. I note that probably no person actually has a vocabulary of 1 million words though. It is only when you take the union of words used by all speakers of a language that you get much larger than 1 million, especially when jargon words are included. There are more than 1 million words in English. In fact there are more than 1 million species of plant and animal, so words for these alone would exceed Jeff's limit, but they aren't in use by everyone. (In fact, '20 questions' has unwritten rules about speci- ficity of concept and use of jargon.)

Even if there were exactly (1020) concepts in the semantic space, this does not mean that 20 gismu would suffice. People divide some areas of semantic space more finely than they do others, because human endeavor is not a uniform spectrum. Thus there is probably no orthogonal set that would come close to achieving what Jeff has in mind.

Something similar has been attempted. Paul Doudna has reported on 'Wordtree'tm, a published attempt with less than 100 gismu roots and their opposites. Every word in the list is expressed as a compound of two simpler ones. It's neat to trace out the composition of a fairly concrete term - you'll find the string to be hundreds of components long. But not practical, and the decomposed root set doesn't in the least suggest the result.

But even if it were possible to devise 20 orthogonal roots for all of language, Jeff's proposed compounding method fails the test of language. Yes a computer could bit-encode and generate short composites. But human beings can't. Lojban rafsi are easily recognizable as to what they represent; Jeff's composites would need to be analyzed carefully to pick them apart to the roots.

Jeff has done a reductio ad absurdum on the centuries-old philosophical attempt to a priori divide the universe into categories (the basis for all of the world's artificial languages that are a priori systems). Lojban is a priori only to the extent it had to be in order to be independent of culture. Efficiency was not, and should not be, the goal; lest Lojban fall below some minimum level of redundancy needed to make human communication feasible.

Lojban is a human language; let it remain one.


Mini Grammar Lessons

Space and time will, by necessity make these discussions abbreviated, but we have noticed some consistent problems among students and correspondents trying to write in Lojban.


On du

On "du": avoid it - like the plague. DO NOT TRANSLATE THE ENGLISH IS AS "du". The cmavo stands roughly for a mathematical equal sign, and you don't go strewing equal signs around your English prose, do you?

Almost always, the English "is" marks the following word as the main "predicate" if English were a predicate language. Lojban is, so make that word or phrase the selbri. Then translate the "is" as either "cu" or "ca" depending on whether you have a good reason to specify present or simultaneous (with the event of the previous sentence) tense. (Unnecessary tense expression should also be avoided in Lojban; it seldom is relevant to meaning.)

In text, "du" has use only to define a word or phrase. In a self-introduction: "mi du la bob.", you are defining "mi". You can also use "du" to define anaphora such as "ko'a" - it's the only way to do so when you have only studied the first couple of lessons.

Otherwise, almost always, one sumti of a "du" bridi will be a quoted word or string, or a lerfu. See my version of the Carroll syllogism for an example of this.


On cu

"cu" is a separator. It doesn't mean anything (when I said just now to translate "is" as "cu", I did so because of grammatical role, not because of meaning.

In a simple sentence, there will be no more than 1 "cu" in the sentence, immediately before the main selbri. In fact, there will always be one there, implicitly. The rules say that you can elide (leave out) "cu" if it doesn't cause ambiguity. Only experience will tell you all the times when such elision is possible, so when in doubt leave it in.

"cu" does not occur between sumti. It does not occur after the selbri to separate it from the following sumti. The following sumti is always identifiable by either an anaphora pronoun or a descriptor like "le", so no separator is needed.

"cu" is very useful. Given its very limited role in the sentence, it can be used to close off some of the most hideously complex grammatical constructs before the main selbri, and to do so completely unambiguously. in fact, that is why it is in the language: to make it easier for a reader or listener to find that all important selbri that indicates just what the speaker is trying to say.

"cu" does occur elsewhere in a sentence, IF the sentence is complex. Most Lojban expressed by the more advanced students tends to be run at a 2nd or 3rd level of iterative complexity, so this may happen quite frequently. When does it so occur?

When a sumti in a sentence internally includes a sentence either as a relative clause ("noi" or "poi", or as an abstracted clause (lexeme NU), that internal sentence is a bridi just like the main sentence. Thus it may need a "cu" to mark its selbri. This is how you get more than one "cu" in a sentence.

Actually, 'natural' Lojban expression, sumti in relative and abstract clauses tend to be of simpler construction (e.g. anaphora or simple descriptions) than sumti in the main sentence. This is why Lojban tends to stop at 2nd or 3rd orders of complexity. Anything more complex tends to play spaghetti with your brain. (Translations of English tend to run 3 or 4 levels deep in complexity if you try to match the style as well as content; English writers tend to use complex run-on sentences - see the monstrosity in Saki for an example with 5 levels of complexity. If style isn't critical to the translation, break it up into digestible chunks.)

Normally, if you are reading or listening in a sumti, running into the "cu" tells you the sumti is over and you are moving on to the selbri. In a complex sentence, it is nearly as simple. If you are in the middle of a complex NU abstraction or relative clause and you run into a "cu", just ask yourself: "Have I run into the main selbri of this clause yet. If not, the "cu" marks the clause of the selbri. If so, then you've ended the sumti, popped out to the next lower level of complexity, and repeat the question. If you get out to the main sentence, you have found the main selbri. This is easy once you get the hang of it, believe it or not.


On ke

"ke" is used mostly in tanru, and overrides left- grouping. Normally, Lojban constructs, including tanru, are left-grouping. This is convenient, since most tanru you come up with will make more sense when left-grouped. But in the occasional event of right-grouping, you need "ke". Using schematics to make things easier, assume that the letters in the following stand for brivla in a tanru.

Normally, a tanru "a b c d" will group as "((a b) c) d" for modification purposes - this means that 'a modifies b' and you determine the meaning of the two-place tanru "a b". You then use the tanru as a modifier to c, forming a new tanru. Finally the meaning of this 3-place tanru serves as a modifier to d.

Now if the tanru you want to express doesn't fit this nice pattern, you may need "ke". Relatively common in a 4- place tanru is the grouping "(a b) (c d)", where you are really making two tanru to express different ideas that are non-simple, then using those pieces to make the more complex tanru. An example might be "zoology textbook". "Zoology" is "animal-science", "textbook" is "student- book". The combined tanru is "(animal-science)-(student- book)", but by left grouping, you would get "((animal- science)-student)-book". By using "ke" in the middle, you get the grouping you want: "danlu saske ke ckule cukta" or "(a b) ke (c d)".

"ke" wouldn't be needed, though, if the right pair in the tanru were made into a lujvo; you now have a left-grouped "(a b) c". "danlu saske cu'ecku" works fine without "ke". Consider making any the right side of a right-grouped con- struct into a lujvo; they usually are natural candidates for doing so, and it eliminates the need for the "ke".

Don't use "ke" when you don't need to. It flags in your reader/listener's mind that you are doing something abnormal. If you then have only a single word after the "ke" you will confuse your listener, even though it is grammatical to use "ke" with a single brivla after it - so don't do it.

"ke" is like a left-parenthesis grouping marker. Note that there is a right marker for "ke", which is "ke'e". (Those with lessons will have "kei"; this was changed after they were written. Change these to "ke'e" in your copies, as you find them, but only where they are closing "ke" in tanru.) "ke'e" is almost never seen. Even when you do need non-left grouping, the right side typically is a simple pair, or a left-grouped triple - thus the "ke'e" would go at the end of the whole tanru. You can always put these final "ke'e" in. But they seldom provide any useful information to the listener/reader - so don't. The only time you should use ke'e in a 4-place tanru is in the grouping "(a ke(b c))ke'e d", where without the "ke'e" you would have "a ke((b c) d).

You can't use a "ke'e" without a matching "ke" preceding it. Not grammatical.

On a related point: if, in a tanru, you need a "nu" or "ka" or "ni" clause that involves only a single brivla, or even a simple tanru, this is a prime candidate to make into a lujvo. For example, in my version of the Carroll syllogism, I had the tanru "visitor-amusement-room", where "amusement" is the event abstraction of "zdile". If I had not made the "nu" event into a lujvo, the tanru would have been "vitke nu zdile kei kumfa" where the "kei" is needed to close off the "nu" so that it doesn't absorb the "kumfa" (and any trailing sumti) into the abstraction. I get rid of the kei by making a lujvo "nunzdi", resulting in the simple left-grouping "vitke nunzdi kumfa", which is much easier to read and understand. Only rarely should you leave "nu" and "kei" surrounding a single brivla - its not fair to the listener/reader.

Note that all these elidables and combinables might be explicitly expressed in longer form to obtain a certain rhyme or meter in poetry - "nu zdile kei" would be different in both rhyme and meter effects from "nunzdi". This is probably the only case where long forms are justifiable.


On ti, ta, tu vs. vi, va, vu

One of the more pervasive problems is the exchange of these words with each other. The "ti" series is a sumti, the "vi" series is part of the tense construction and is used to inflect a selbri or as a sumti tag. Do not use "vi" as a sumti - it is not grammatical: "*mi klama vi" does not mean "I am-coming-here."; however "mi klama ti" does work for this, presuming that you in some way indicate where 'here' is - an accurate translation that clarifies this would be "I am-coming to this-here."

The opposite situation is where more errors occur. "ti" can confuse if you assume it is always a translation for "this". "le ti cukta" is not "this book" - you are leaving out the "le" from the translation, which should be "the this book". You might use this if there are books in two boxes (and hence not visible to be pointed at). You could then point to one box and say "ko cpacu le ti cukta" - get this thing's book. The "ti" in such a position is like a possessive; compare with "le mi cukta" ("my book" or, more accurately, "the me book").

To express "this book", you wish to mark the book, a brivla, with a location. So you use "le vi cukta" - "the here-book" or "le va cukta" - "the there-book".

We'll address one other issue with "this", in a moment.


On po'e, po, pe, po'u

These four words are used to attach sumti to another sumti in such a way as to provide additional information, aiding the listener/reader to know exactly what that first sumti is referring to. They are members of lexeme "goi", and the right sumti is followed by a normally elidable "ge'u". If found in a complex construction, these bind with the closest sumti. Thus "le mapku .e le grana po mi" is "the cap, and the rod-of-mine"; the "po" has nothing to do with "le mapku".

The last two have non-restrictive counterparts, ne and no'u, when you want to relate the second sumti to the first as incidental information not needed for identification of the first sumti.

These four words are the Lojban expressions of possession. Yes, I know I just said that "le mi cukta" is a possessive. But "le mi cukta" is IDENTICAL in meaning to "le cukta po mi" - with no qualifications. One translates as "the me book", the other as "the book of mine".

Let us first dispense with "po'u", which is the 'identity possessive'. (This is changed from the published lessons which used "pe". Change all "pe" to "po'u" and all "po'u" to "pe" in your lessons. Then change all "ne" to "no'u" and all "mo'u" to "ne". These will be found in Lessons 5 and 6 only.) "po'u" indicates another identity for the sumti it is attached to, hopefully giving more information to listener to help in identifying the sumti. Thus, if two people (Jill and John) in a room are both doctors, you could say "le mikce po'u la djil." to indicate "The doctor who-is the one named Jill." "po'u" almost always translates as "who-is" or "which is". It may also be viewed as a contraction of "poi du", although the latter would have a different elidable terminator on the right side of the right sumti, if one is required.

The other three are more like our familiar possessives. Unlike English, incidentally, none of the Lojban possessives inherent implies legal ownership. "le cukta po mi" or "le mi cukta" says only that there is some unspecified relationship between 'me' and 'the book'. The germane brivla for "po" is "steci" - "is-specific-to", not "ponse" "possesses".

"po'e" and "po'u" are best described in relation to the non-specific "po". "po'e" specifies a close relationship, one that is permanent or inalienable. Your mind is inalienably yours. Your experiences are also inalienably yours. So you can say "le menli po'e mi" instead of the weaker "le menli po mi" or "le mi menli". Quite often, if "po'e" is called for in usage, you will find that there is a place in the brivla reserved for the relationship. You can say "le birka po'e mi" - "The arm of me.", but it is preferred that you use the place structure provided for "birka": "le birka be mi". "po'e" exists because you may not know the place structure (Oops!), or the left side sumti may not HAVE a place structure. Thus, if two mothers (Jane and Jill) have sons named John, you can say "la djan. po'e la djein." to indicate one of them.

"pe" is, on the other hand, a looser relationship. The germane brivla is "srana" - "pertains to". "pe" is used to attach incidental identifying information. When visiting someone else and sitting in a chair there, someone might refer to "le stizu pe do", "the chair that pertains to you". In a classroom with assigned seating, the teacher might use "po" instead: "le stizu po do", "the chair that is specific to you".

"pe", and its non-restrictive counterpart "ne", are also used to attach any number of relative phrases providing identifying information marked with sumti tags, or even a bare 'tense/location'. "le vi cukta" is equivalent to "le cukta pe vi". In general, if there is a sumti tag, you should use "pe" or "ne". Thus the examples used in the discussion of Greg Higley's question above. (There could be exceptions - the colloquial English "the man of the hour" might be rendered as "le prenu po'e ca" instead of "le prenu pe ca", indicating that the speaker expects that the person will inalienably always be associated with that time in the listener's mind.

All of these words are symmetrical, which is why we say that Lojban has no true possessive in the same sense as English. In Lojban, you can say "le birka po'e mi" or "mi po'e le birka" - "I that am inalienably associated with the arm.", or colloquially "the arm's me"; the reason for doing so would be if the listener would find it easier to identify you knowing that you were associated with 'the arm', presumably an arm that the listener already had identified. "po" and "pe" work similarly, and "po'u" obviously so. The assumption with the 'pV(V)' cmavo in this set is that the listener doesn't know which of several possible interpretation of the left sumti the speaker is referring to, and the sumti attached will provide useful identifying information. For the 'nV(V)' words, the reverse is true. The listener knows the referent of the left sumti, and the speaker is supplying a hitherto unstated associational information about that sumti, that is incidental to the main point of the statement.

On go'i vs. ti vs. di'u vs. la'edi'u

As stated above, "this" is not always translated as "ti". The latter is used only when you can point to the referent or otherwise indicate it - this is why "ti" is called a demonstrative.

On the other hand, you will almost always translate the English "I'm doing this, too." as "mi go'i". "go'i" repeats the MAIN selbri of the previous sentence (not the last selbri, which might be in a relative clause or NU abstraction), carrying over all sumti, except those that may be replaced in the new sentence by new values, and carrying over the tense/location, unless replaced.

But be careful! "go'i" has the grammar of a brivla. You cannot say "*go'i fasnu" for "This happened". The Lojban, which is grammatical, is an odd tanru, whose meaning is dependent on just what "go'i" refers to. To refer to the event of the previous sentence, you use "la'edi'u", which literally means "the referent of the previous sentence": "la'edi'u fasnu" correctly translates "This happened". (You can also use "lenu go'i", which has similar meaning to "la'edi'u", but is likely to require a closing "kei" to avoid sucking any following sumti into the abstraction bri- di.

But if you want to say "This is true." about the previous sentence, you do not say "la'edi'u jetnu". You've fallen into the trap of reference vs. reality. "la'edi'u" refers to the referent of the previous sentence, not to the sentence itself, which is "di'u" ("la'e", unsurprisingly, means "the referent of ..." attaching to a following sumti; it may be used like a computer language pointer, indicating the attached sumti points to or describes the thing you actually want to refer to.)


Hopefully, these discussions clarify some problems you may have had. I'll find out when you send some Lojban text that uses them.


On Sapir-Whorf

Report on LogFest

Of the four who agreed to write reports on the extensive discussion of Sapir-Whorf last June at LogFest, only pc actually submitted one. For those not present, the discussion resulted from Ralph Dumain's comments back in JL6, and a further selection that he submitted for publication a few months later. The latter included a bibliography; this list seemed to be slanted towards a particular viewpoint, and omitted basic works like John Carroll's collection of Whorf's papers, and any reference to Sapir (I've yet to have someone tell me where Sapir said things about SWH).

Seeing a need for balance, and recalling Ralph's strong criticisms of Loglan/Lojban's scientific approach to SWH, I proposed a group discussion at LogFest. Ideally, we would have discussed JCB's statements on the subject from the new L1, but that book was not published before LogFest.

Unfortunately I didn't get to participate in much of the discussion, so I asked the major participants to write up what happened. What follows is pc's perceptions of the session. Note that this report was written before pc had seen Loglan 1. He has given me only one comment in writing on the latter, which is also found below.

Athelstan, during the session, attempted to formulate an expression of Sapir-Whorf that reflected the consensus; this is also included here, although Athelstan didn't report on the group reaction to his formulation. So you get to react!


pc Reports

As for SWH, my memories of that session run something like this:

The SWH session was devoted to two and a half questions: what is the hypothesis, or, better, what does Jim Brown take it to be, and could it be true. There was also some discussion of how the hypothesis might be tested, obviously tied to the first question.

Those who have read Whorf or even Brown admitted that what they said was pretty unclear but the general characterization of the hypothesis to be something between a very weak view and a very strong one. The weakest view was that having a lexical item for a thing or property permitted a speaker to spot that property or thing more readily than a speaker without that item in his vocabulary. The strongest reading was that having a certain grammatical category in a language compelled the speakers of that language to conceptualize their world in terms of the onto- logical correlates of that grammatical category. The strengthening/weakening of the hypothesis seems to be done by replacement first of all between "enables a speaker to do better" and "compels a speaker to do" and then by referring to items at different levels of abstraction as governing: lexical item, conceptual class, construction, ..., grammatical category. Whorf wrote about both extremes and seems to have placed most emphasis on the strongest form - or the one just weaker - that the existence of a category made it easier for a speaker to conceptualize that way, or perhaps harder not to.

Brown's position is less clear since not (at that time - there is said to be more in the new edition of L1) spelled out at any length (mirabile dictu!). What he does say seems towards the stronger end in involving grammatical categories (the importance of having only the category predicate in content words) but weaker in only postulating an enabling rather than a compelling character - but presumably enabling a speaker of the new language to do new things by breaking the compulsions (or at least tendencies) of the old. This was more inferred from the features that Brown stressed in his design of Loglan then form what he said directly about SWH, although he does also stress that his vocabulary is culturally neutral, looking also toward the weaker end of the spectrum of possible hypotheses. Another feature of Brown's view (which was not stressed in the discussion) is the role of metaphor, suggesting that one part of the hypothesis he is interested in is that the easier it is to bring two words into grammatical relationship, the easier it is to see connections between the two things they represent.

On the subject of truth [of SWH], the weakest hypothesis was generally held to be uninteresting because a truism, although some experiments said to aim at testing it were reported to have had results taken as non-confirming (monolingual English- and Russian-speaking children sorted objects by color in about the same way or did not differ in ways that matched nicely with differing color vocabularies, for example.) But there were some questions about just what those tests tested and so some talk occurred about how better tests might be devised ("better" - it turned out, meaning ones that confirmed the truism.) The strongest thesis was obviously more interesting but generally thought either clearly false or untestable. On the false side was the fact that, for example, nearly every discussion of process metaphysics has been in a heavily noun-adjective-verb language, which ought to force a static metaphysics. Of course, most of these discussions [of metaphysics] have also said that the reality they were pointing to was ultimately ineffable and beyond conceptualization, which might be evidence that the hypothesis is correct. (Most process metaphysics is also done in Indo-European languages, which can be taken - it is said - as being ultimately verb-based and so "really" pointing to a process conceptualization.) A large part of the notion that this hypothesis is untestable, was, then, derived from the fact that it was unclear how to tell either what the grammatical categories of a language really were and what the conceptualization/perception its speakers really had - as opposed to the way they expressed it in the language. The latter seemed especially an impossible task, since conceptualization is not usually accessible except through language (or so it seemed) and thus the test became circular.

By and large, the Brown test (as we understood it) - to look for changes in behavior/conceptualization/personality (in a broad sense) when a new language is learned, to correlate with features of the new language - looked like as reasonable a test as was possible. The problem was, of course, what features of the new language were to be relevant and what are the appropriate correlates of these features? Brown's design of Loglan gives some clues to his ideas of appropriate features, as noted above, but what traits he would correlate with each was still unclear. Nor did anyone have any useful suggestions beyond those made in Ju'i Lobypli at other times.

I should note in passing that, like earlier more formal discussion of SWH in academic circles, our discussion generated much more heat than light, with some of even our mildest members becoming rather abusive to some of their opponents. I think we did manage to end amicably, however.


Athelstan's Formulation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Whorf says that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH) occurs through the grammar, not the lexicon. Grammar is a pattern of increasingly complex relationships between words, and then groups of relationships between words, thus building a continuum of complexity from lexicon to grammar.

If Whorf's grammatical view is some-what correct, it may still be a semantic effect. In analyzing apparent SWH effects towards the grammatical end of the spectrum, semantics affects thought more subtly and less avoidably.

Compare Marvin Minsky's view of intelligence as a progressively built complex of interactions between reactions, agents, and groups of them.


Bob's note: Athelstan has expanded upon this formulation into a more quantitative view of SWH than I have heard before. He has written this up in technical Lojban, and the result will be in JL11.


Discussion on Jim Brown's Sapir-Whorf Test in Loglan 14th Edition

We'd like more opinions on what the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH) is and how to test it. After the heated debate at LogFest, we were surprised that Jim Brown does not even refer to 'strong' or 'weak' versions of the SWH in Loglan 1. It seems that Jim's views are orthogonal to that civilization" due to Chinese grammar and the "virtually classification scheme - which may be the most significant theoretical advance in Jim's formulation - he has changed the terms of the debate on SWH, perhaps in a direction less subject to philosophical and political posturing that pc reports has haunted SWH throughout its history.

Jim also discusses how he thinks SWH may be tested in L1. pc, Athelstan, and I have found the test he proposes to be scientifically invalid, but perhaps the seed of a more valid test.

The following, from our longer review of L1, which the LK10 review was condensed from, discusses what Jim Brown proposes for the SWH and the Loglan test, and why we believe it to be inadequate. The text is not polished to the extent we would have liked, nor is it written in the apolitical, academically disinterested style we eventually adopted for the review; Athelstan and I have ruled out spending a lot more time on L1 for a while. But the ideas therein should stimulate thought among those of you interested in using Lojban to test SWH; they also should raise questions about the nature of experimental linguistic research in general - important if Lojban indeed is to be the cradle of experimental linguistics.

from Bob & Athelstan's Unabridged Review

The main discussion of the scientific rationale for the language takes place in the introduction and in the new Chapter 7 on "Testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis". The introductory section is lucid and presents the purpose of the language quite well. In Chapter 7, he then goes on to explore a variety of formulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as he perceives it, and discusses the implications of these formulations for testing.

In so doing he nicely avoids the controversial aspects of Sapir-Whorf, including the politically and philosophically issue of 'linguistic relativity' that Ralph Dumain discussed in JL7, as well as the various attempts to divide the hypothesis into a strong and untenable form (that due to different language structures, people can never truly understand the culture of another language community) and a weak and trite form (different languages give different perspectives, so learning a new one broadens your mind).

The formulations he chooses as best exemplifying Sapir- Whorf are that "a pattern of relationships exists between the cultures of certain peoples and the structures fo the individual languages with which those cultures were associ- ated", that "structural features of languages are seen by Whorf as limiting the domain of the possible for minds shaped by them" and (actually from American philosopher F. S. C. Northrup) "a facilitory one ... notational advances ... that replace other notations are facilitory", or in other words, that a language with a more efficient or effective way of expressing certain kinds of ideas will cause its associated culture to be richer in the realms of those ideas. Dr. Brown cites the "enabling" effects of new mathematical notations, and the relative poetic richness and "deeply esthetic orientation of the Chinese limitless interplay of verbal categories" found in Chinese.

Dr. Brown then goes on to claim that Loglan can be used to test either of these formulations, and outlines a fairly detailed approach to such a test. Along the way, he points out that the nature of modern science is such that experiments must be designed to disprove a theory or model assuming that it is true, rather than to try to prove the model, and that scientific advance comes when such experi- ments lead to refinements of the model that allow it to more accurately describe reality.

Dr. Brown also indicates that the 'Whorfian effects' perceived by current loglanists are not scientifically useful, although he then goes on to use those effects as a means of identifying true 'Whorfian effects' in a test population. This is but the first sign of several that Dr. Brown's remarkably cogent presentation of the hypothesis and the problems in testing it did not open his mind to countless problems that he did not see. The result is that his detailed experimental scheme is fatally flawed.

A few brief examples are needed; this section is the major new section of the book and covers an important part of the scientific justification for the language.

First, Dr. Brown suggests that a useful test of Sapir-Whorf can be conducted with second language learners, specifically American university students (not the most homogeneous of intellects or cultures) who study Loglan, French, and Chinese in a "Summer Workshop" 'total immersion' environment. He then contradicts himself by deciding that this workshop should last 8 months for Chinese, 4 months for French, and two months for Loglan (he does not propose any standard for setting these times, like a pre- experiment to determine how long it takes to reach a measurable level of proficiency using the proposed teaching methods; nor does he recognize that time taken to learn a language may be unrelated to time needed to evoke 'Whorfian effects' - the difficulty of Chinese is due more to its writing system and tones, while the grammar is relatively easy to learn - so 'Whorfian effects' based on grammatical structure may show up relatively sooner).

Also, the summers may be awesomely long in Gainesville (8 months?), but even so, few university students are going to be able or willing to take 8 solid months of their educational program to study a single subject, even for pay, unless that subject was their primary interest - and he has specifically excluded choosing students on the basis of their interest in the language. (Money doesn't motivate everybody, Jim!) Dr. Brown never really addresses the question of holding a disinterested subject's interest in learning a language (probably the toughest problem in foreign language education), except to hold out to the non- Loglan students the offer to teach them Loglan for free in a workshop the following summer. Wow.

Somewhat surprisingly, he chooses to measure 'creativity' as the area for detecting short-term Sapir-Whorf effects, and not the logical thinking that is the original basis for the language. This is actually a good choice; it is too likely that any attempts to measure development of logical thought over a short period will be colored by the teaching methodology used and the fact of actually teaching of logic, since most people are ignorant of logic, especially as it applies to their linguistic expression. He suggests that linguistic creativity be the basis for measurement, citing the 'Whorfian effects' mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, he never addresses the issue on a basis of cultural development. The tests he proposes measure individual creativity, and not cultural creativity. A far better test might be the comparative group solving of problems requiring significant creativity and linguistic interaction in the target language, and measuring either speed or quality of results.

This example shows how Dr. Brown's elucidation, while in itself severely flawed, is useful in pointing to a better approach; the above alternative test was composed 'at the computer' as this is written, merely on rereading the relevant section.

Another problem is Dr. Brown's failure to take into account the bias imposed by the teachers of these workshops. Recalling the difficulty in motivating disinterested students in learning a language, one cannot imagine trying to teach them Loglan without engaging in the type of word-play and linguistic experimentation that the experiment is supposed to measure. This would be especially heightened if the teachers are today's loglanists, as Dr. Brown proposes; we all recall what inspired our passionate interest in Loglan and would be unable to teach it to others without passing along that which we found inspiring. It is unlikely that Chinese and French teachers could be found that could emphasize the same mix of skills and interests as the Loglan teachers of this generation, and Dr. Brown, while addressing several other biases, does not appear to recognize this one in his at-tempt to convince people of the relative immediacy of a possible Sapir-Whorf test.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of Dr. Brown's inadequate analysis of the problem is his method of eliminating what he calls "host culture effects". He chooses the three languages to be taught on the basis that French is a lot like English, while Chinese is different, in ways he presumes are like Lojban's (He never says why Lojban is more extreme than Chinese in ways that would increase linguistic creativity). He predicts that this comparison would cancel effects not due to the languages themselves,with succeedingly higher 'Whorfian effects' in comparing French to Chinese to Loglan students. (He doesn't explain why this test couldn't be done with three natural languages first, if only to prove the methodology.) To eliminate host country effects, he then suggests that French students be given the same program, with the expected results to be increasing from English to Chinese to Lojban. He also proposes a similar test for Chinese students, but never indicates the results that would be expected (which are indeterminate with regard to his method-ology, since English and French are supposedly equidistant from Chinese, while Loglan is an unknown difference from Chinese - presumably less, but skewed in a direction that would increase 'Whorfian effects' as much the 'short distance' would minimize them). For long-term effects, Dr. Brown proposes a five-year period of relatively low levels of monitoring and control. He indicates some of the difficulties of monitoring such long-term studies, but forgets the obvious one. Why would the students, by design not especially interested in Loglan to begin with, be expected to continue to grow in fluency and usage? Where is the 'cultural environment' wherein they would interact to grow in this manner? If their lifestyle and interactions with others do not demand use of loglandic features that would generate 'Whorfian effects' to be tested, such as logical competence, it is unlikely that any such effects will be noticed.

As an comparative example, how many English speakers can identify the implications of a restrictive vs. a non- restrictive relative clause even a week after the grammar test, even though that is a structure basic to English grammar (as well as Loglan's). (One of our respondents indicates that most college graduates don't even clearly remember the difference between nouns, verbs, and adjectives, five years after college. This may indicate why many Americans can't write cogently, and why these parts of speech are blending together; e.g., using 'impact' as a verb. Dr. Brown suggests, while discussing metaphor relations, that English and European languages may be evolving towards this loglandic ideal.)

Interestingly, Dr. Brown doesn't mention any testing implications related to the 'metaphysical parsimony' that is a basic design principle of the language. What 'Whorfian effects' might be expected by the optional tense approach? Dr.Brown doesn't discuss this, nor does he suggest a comparison with the Hopi language and culture that led Whorf to his hypothesis.

These reviewers believe that Dr. Brown has made no case that suggests that Sapir-Whorf testing is plausible without at least second-generation bi-lingual speakers who can interact in a significantly loglandic environment. In fact, theproblems he foresees suggest that it is harder than originally perceived to isolate variables that would invalidate test results. However, by at least discussing the topic, after years of silence, Dr. Brown has made it possible for others to build on his work, perhaps solving the problems that seem to make a Sapir-Whorf test impractical in the near future.

Our conclusion is that Dr. Brown has made a start towards a Sapir-Whorf test strategy, but that his approach is academically weak. He embarrasses his 'advisors', including scholars noteworthy in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and language education, by suggesting their presumed approval of this approach. It is little wonder that the NSF proposals in the mid-70s did not impress the linguistics experts that reviewed them, who were possibly more committed to a thorough peer review of the program than was Dr. Brown's team.


from pc (John Parks-Clifford)

I was surprised that Jim's discussion made no mention of the two big projects on the Whorf Hypothesis (WH) (and related stuff) held in the early 50's. Surely these conferences must have influenced him to think about the issue, if only indirectly. Moreover, they were the biggest (and so far as I can find, the only) major projects - government and foundation grants, great lists of top-ranking second-raters as participants - ever conducted on WH. All the fields involved went off in other directions shortly after the proceedings were published in 1954 and 1958. The most sharply focussed (on WH) was held at U/Chicago in March 1953 with a Ford grant. The papers and the discussions around them we reedited by Harry Hoijer (from whom I first got doses of WH) and published by U/Chicago Press in 1954 as Language and Culture. The other, at U/Michigan using grants from Rockefeller and Ford, ran through the academic year 1951-2. It's results, which start at WH but go far afield (a lot of philosophers involved in this one) were summarized by Paul Hanlein Language, Thought, and Culture published in 1958 by U/Michigan Press, reprinted in paperback in 1965. I haven't looked at either in 20 years, so I don't remember much about conclusions (except that they were generally negative, I seem to recall) or any details. Still, they seem like a good place to get through in any discussion of WH.


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