"lo do ckiku ma zvati" is "Where are your Keys?" in Lojban. "Where
are your Keys?" is a language learning game I've been involved with
the past 6 months. I host regular WAYK Spanish sessions, and play
WAYK solo in teaching myself Lojban.
Yesterday Willem & Evan linked to my site from the "Where are your
Keys?" website:
http://whereareyourkeys.org/2010/03/01/wayk-lojban/
I think it is probably time to mention it here as well! I've had a
lot of help doing translation from the fine folks on #lojban, and
this project has rapidly accelerated the rate at which I'm learning
Lojban.
I'd love you to have a look at the website, and if this game seems
interesting, I'm looking for help.
1) If you're interested in learning the game in person, there are
clusters of players in Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico,
both in the United States. If you happen to be proximate to those
areas and find this game interesting, I'd really like to put you in
touch with Willem & Evan, or myself. I play WAYK Lojban solo, and
want to find someone to play with!
2) I'd love translation help. The "Universal Speed Curriculum" (in
English:
http://whereareyourkeys.org/2009/09/12/the-wayk-universal-speed-curriculum/,
and in Lojban: http://lodockikumazvati.org/le_vajrai_se_tadni/) is
simple enough that a beginning student of Lojban (like myself) can
make a decent attempt at translation. Both playing "lo do ckiku ma
zvati" and doing meta-work for the game itself is friendly to low-fluency
speakers.
Failing either of those two things, your encouragement, feedback,
and thoughts are most welcome. Talk to me!
-Alan
--
Every place a riddle,
every riddle a poem,
every poem a spirit,
every spirit a place.
This did not get the response it deserved.
Stephen Weeks has been talking to me about a local (San Francisco
bay area) WAYK group that has met ... once? twice? ... and
apparently went quite well.
I'm *very* impressed by
http://lodockikumazvati.org/se_tadni/le_vajrai_se_tadni_20100524.pdf
, in particular by the use of signwriting.
Go you!
A general question about WAYK, which I find difficult to learn from
the website: I notice that your version of the universal speed
curriculum has signs in it, but
http://whereareyourkeys.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/usc-wayk-espanol.pdf
, for example, does not. Is the game always played with ASL as part
of it? I mean, do you basically *have* to learn ASL to play WAYK?
(this wouldn't bother me; I want to learn ASL anyways, just want
clarification)
Some minor comments:
1. You say that the signs are "what that", but it's actually "that
what".
2. ASL "question" is a bit more complicated than that:
http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/searchsign.php?ui=1&sgn=4&sid=2789
3. Is this:
http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/searchsign.php?ui=1&sgn=4&sid=8529
what you're using for ja'a? Yeah, looks like. Not sure what you're
going to do when you get to {nu'e}, but other than that I like it.
:)
4. What's with all the {cu} and {vau}? Seems unnecessarily
complicated.
-Robin
--
http://singinst.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei". My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/
<digression>
ooh... signwriting. I installed that on my computer some 17 years
ago or so. I used it on my (now defunct) homepage. I'm even
mentioned on their website a few times.... Ah, brings back memories...
</digression>
--gejyspa
Thank you so much Robin.
> A general question about WAYK, which I find difficult to learn from
> the website: I notice that your version of the universal speed
> curriculum has signs in it, but
> http://whereareyourkeys.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/usc-wayk-espanol.pdf
> , for example, does not. Is the game always played with ASL as part
> of it? I mean, do you basically *have* to learn ASL to play WAYK?
> (this wouldn't bother me; I want to learn ASL anyways, just want
> clarification)
>
The game is always played with ASL. You have to learn at least as
much ASL as you have proficiency in your target spoken language.
My adding the signs to the USC (Universal Speed Curriculum) was a
technical innovation on my part that hasn't made it's way back to
the USC Espa�ol, USC Engilsh, or USC Chinuk Wawa.
The USC Espa�ol was translated by Billy and Walter for my WAYK
group. I didn't know about SignWriting at the time, and only came
to use it after I started working on WAYK Lojban material.
> Some minor comments:
>
> 1. You say that the signs are "what that", but it's actually "that
> what".
>
I have fixed this in my repository and it will go out in the next
update:
http://github.com/alanpost/lodockikumazvati/commit/caa6e2793d2f39ceb46dccc9b47e11306ee1b9b1
> 2. ASL "question" is a bit more complicated than that:
> http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/searchsign.php?ui=1&sgn=4&sid=2789
>
Indeed so. I need to update the website to swis 2010 before I can
fix this bug, but I'll get it fixed.
> 3. Is this:
> http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/searchsign.php?ui=1&sgn=4&sid=8529
> what you're using for ja'a? Yeah, looks like. Not sure what you're
> going to do when you get to {nu'e}, but other than that I like it.
> :)
>
I've had to make a policy of not worrying too much about what I'll
be doing next or I'd never get the current step done...
In general, I think the further along I get translating things into
Lojban, the more frustrating it will be to translate the ASL. I've
been brainstorming some coping strategies for this, but haven't had
to use them yet.
It does make me wish for Signed Exact Lojban. ;-)
> 4. What's with all the {cu} and {vau}? Seems unnecessarily
> complicated.
>
On IRC, I was told (I think by xorxes) that it is standard procedure
to teach newbies all the elidable terminators and only after
practicing with them begin to practice without them.
It didn't quite fit my own intuition, but I was trying to adopt the
best practice we've discovered for teaching Lojban. I'm happy to
discuss this. It may turn out there isn't concensus on which is
best.
-Alan
--
ko djuno fi le do sevzi
Definitely not by me. I don't really have any insights as to what is
best for teaching, but text with elidable terminators not elided
always strikes me as very weird.
> It didn't quite fit my own intuition, but I was trying to adopt the
> best practice we've discovered for teaching Lojban. I'm happy to
> discuss this. It may turn out there isn't concensus on which is
> best.
That's probably the case.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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Really? You think avoiding "cu" is better than avoiding "ku"? My
Berenstain Bears has 49 "cu"'s, and only 16 "ku"s, so you better darn
well know what cu means before you read this beginner book.
-gejyspa
That seems amazingly obnoxious to me; I doubt I'd have learned the
language in that case.
[snip]
> 2. "Well, now here's a cute trick. Right here, we don't actually
> need "ku", because it reads the same either way."
>
> Sometimes you need it for random strange reasons with convoluted
> rules, or you learn that you always need it and sometimes it can
> be left off.
>
> For pedagogical reasons, option 2 has proven time and time again
> to be the better alternative that results in much better
> diction/word-choice/ phrasing. Please don't teach or use {cu}
> until you've gotten well past things like abstractions, and even
> then, don't use it unless it's absolutely necessary for the sake
> of brevity (ex: {.i lo nu mi broda be lo brode be lo brodi bei lo
> brodo be lo brodu cu co'e} instead of {.i lo nu mi broda be lo
> brode be lo brodi ku bei lo brodo be lo brodu ku be'o ku be'o ku
> be'o ku kei ku co'e}).
You forgot {vau}. The correctly terminated version of that
sentence, according to jbofihe, is:
.i lo nu mi broda be lo brode be lo brodi ku bei lo brodo be lo
brodu ku be'o ku be'o ku be'o vau kei ku co'e vau
Placing {ku} after every sumti is absolutely insane to me, let alone
placing {vau} everywhere it's required (which you're clearly not
doing, so you're not following your own advice).
If you think teaching that is resulting in better learning of the
language, I'm going to want some significant evidence, because as
far as I know almost all of the best speakers learned Lojban from
the CLL, which introduces {cu} almost immediately (chapter 2,
section 5) but not {ku} until much later (chapter 6, section 2).
The first elidable terminator I can find mentioned is {ke'e}, in
5.5.
Having said all that, there's lots of activity in #lojban I'm not on
top of today; if there are a bunch of people who are great with the
language and learned with "all elidable terminators required (except
vau, I guess)", please have them speak up here.
Exactly. The second version is *horrible* for beginners, IMO. Even
without the unnecessary {cu}. It just adds huge complexity and
verbosity for no useful gain.
The *vast* majority of beginner sentences need exactly one {cu}, and
no other terminators. Teaching them in that context is pointless.
If that was all it was, I would agree, but you also need to teach
the requirement for {vau} and {kei} and {ku'o} and how to order them
and on and on and on.
Or you could just say "put {cu} in front of all your selbri. you
don't know how to talk about more than one event or relative clause
per sentence yet", and that will give a beginner the abillity to say
90% of normal "Where is the bathroom?" sentences, and you're done.
On the one hand, I utterly disagree that teching even the
*existance* of terminators to a beginner is a good idea. 90+% of
all conversational WAYK-type sentences can be said with exactly on
{cu} and no terminators, and so they should be taught that way.
On the other hand, I haven't done any active teaching of Lojban to
anyone from scratch in 8+ years, except at jbonunsla.
At jbonunsla, where we usually have a live class for 1-3 students,
My recollection is that confuse the hell out of people, and we avoid
them like the plague. OTOH, it never occured to use to teach them
as required and then drop them later.
There are other people who have done much more teaching more
recently than I have, though; if they've got students that are
conversationally fluent and have learned that way, I'd love to hear
about it.
--
You know, it occurs to me that *even if* that's the best pedagogical
solution, it's still wrong for WAYK.
The point of WAYK is to teach the language as it is actually spoken,
is it not? I have never said {le pendo ku klama le zarci ku vau} in
my life, and never will; that's not the language as it's actually
used, so WAYK shouldn't be teaching it.
That's fantastic. I've been wanting to learn a sign language
anyway.
I just wish there was more universalism to them than there is to
spoken languages. Oh well.
This makes perfect sense to me. I will revert the use of all
elidable terminators in the Lojban USC.
This is exactly why I can't stand the idea of teaching {cu} right at the beginning. I still catch myself thinking things like {ta cu gerku} because I got into the bad habbit of thinking of {cu} as being like "is"/"does".
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Please don't use "proven" unless you have actual evidence. I see
assertions with nothing to back them up, from you and everyone else
in this thread (including me, although I'll be happy to give you a
list of people who can hold a comfortable verbal convo in Lojban and
learned the opposite way if you like).
> In fact, most of the new generation -does- speak that way
Who would these people be, and how good are they?
> Besides, even if we -are- talking about brevity, it's the same
> thing. There's no difference in length between {.i lo broda ku
> brode} and {.i lo broda cu brode},
It's the longer cases I'm worried about; poi and nu and such.
> but the former develops better habits later on.
I *utterly* disagree with that bit. It encourages people to say
things like {le nu broda kei ku brode}, which I consider a very bad
habit indeed.
Now, having said that, people have been suggesting in IRC that
thinking of sumti as bound on both sides (by le and ku) leads to a
better understanding of where to put the terminators when they're
actually needed, which is certainly interesting.
That's an interesting argument; missed that on my first read.
> that don't actually know how to terminate that say things like {mi
> cu dunda zo'e zo'e} (I have actually seen stuff like this).
1. I don't see how that use of {cu} has anything to do with
thinking of {cu} as the copula.
2. That example looks perfectly valid to me except for the extra
{cu}. Am I missing something?
"{mi cu dunda}" is actually perfectly grammatically correct. (It's
unnecessarily verbose and arguably bad style, but if that's your sole objection
to it, you might want to look in the mirror.) "{cu}" means "the {bridi}'s main
{selbri} starts here," which implies the termination of anything before it,
rather than termination being the primary concept and the main {selbri} aspect
secondary. The only (non-obvious) grammatical restriction on "{cu}" is that it
must be preceded by at least one term in the sentence, where a "term" can be a
{sumti} (including descriptor {sumti} and pro-{sumti}), a termset, a {sumti}
tagged with a {sumti tcita}, a bare BAI KU, a NA KU, or even a FA KU.
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
lo paroi cumki cu rere'u cumki
--
Nothing wrong with "ta cu gerku". "cu" is not a copula or auxiliary, it's a
predicate marker, a part of speech which does not exist in English, but does
in Tok Pisin (though the rules are different). Tok Pisin, unlike Lojban,
distinguishes common nouns, adjectives, and verbs, but uses "i" with all of
them.
ta (cu) gerku = em i dok
ta (cu) barda = em i bikpela
le gerku cu barda = dok i bikpela
le remna cu klama le tricu = man i go long diwai
do barda = yu bikpela (I think "yu i bikpela" is grammatical, but not said)
Pierre
--
li ze te'a ci vu'u ci bi'e te'a mu du
li ci su'i ze te'a mu bi'e vu'u ci
-Robin
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--gejyspa
-Robin
Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are irrelevant, because they don't deal with
anything that could involve terminators.
In Chapter 2, Section 10, first example:
mi tavla do le tavla ku
Shortly followed by:
"In many cases the word ``ku'' may be omitted. In particular, it is
never necessary in a description at the end of a sentence, so:"
mu'o mi'e xorxes
Huh. Missed that.
-Robin
Okay, seriously, how do you play this game? I have no idea what I'm doing.