A new member has some questions

[Lormoral King]

Hello everyone,

this is my first mail to this list. I recently found out about Lojban and have been spending a lot of time reading about it. When learning languages, I prefer to first get a very broad overview before focusing on the details. Once I am more familiar with the big picture I can better tell where all the little things I learn go in the grand scheme of things. So, I have been reading as much as I could fine online; mostly tiki pages and some old mailing list conversations, but I also saw some comments on the facebook group that interested me. I understand the language is currently in a flux, though I cannot quite tell what the officials' stance on anything is. I have seen talk of certain proposed changes, and I'd be interested to know what I should think of them and also what their status is, specifically the 'dotside' reform, the thing about connectives getting reduced (I hope you know what I mean), and what I think was called 'cmevla as a class of brivla' (I wasn't really able to follow the discussions). Also, I saw some people using different accent marks sometimes, Does this mean I can capitalize words, since capital letters were previously used for stress marking purposes?

I hope I didn't ask too many questions!

        mi'e Ucauricu'um (I hope I said that right)

[John E Clifford]

As a long-time, and generally outside, observer of Lojban, I encourage you to get into the language more fully.  The basics are easy and satisfying, the details perhaps less so.  

But to your questions.  Officially, Lojban is not in a state of flux.  It is the language of CLL with a few long-established corrections.  It will remain that until the completion of the mythical baseline, after which suggestions for change will be entertained.  To be sure, the committee for establishing the baseline does not appear to have met for many years, has not recently (if ever) released a report or made a survey, and, indeed, may not be constituted at the moment.  In its absence -- and before it was constituted, indeed, since the moment of creation of Lojban -- people have been suggesting changes, "improvements", and using these non-standard forms freely, with or without the cooperation or understanding of other Lojbanists.  Some of these innovations have been generally, sometimes even quasi-officially, accepted.  Along with CLL, these latter few are worth knowing.

One such is clearly dot-side, the requirement that every name be completely surrounded by pauses to distinguish it from other structures which may have the same form -- and to remove some technical phonetic restrictions on names in CLL.

On the other hand, the reduction in the number of connectives and the collapse of the class of cmevla to the class of brivla are not established even though, for the second, the difference is essentially terminological and, for the first, is a desirable goal for both simplification and logical clarity.  

The various ways of doing stress (only in names, of course, since stress is otherwise fixed) are mainly matters of personal aesthetics.  Just know the possibilities and act accordingly.  I don't think it will ever be a Lojban style to use capital letters purely to indicate proper nouns or the like; this is adequately handled phonologically and syntactically.

These are all pretty much details, to be worried about -- if at all -- after you have come to some degree of proficiency with basics, like getting atomic structures right and moving pieces around with ease.

---

From: Lormoral King <ucaur...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 8:15 AM
Subject: [lojban] A new member has some questions

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[iesk]

Le mercredi 2 octobre 2013 15:15:21 UTC+2, Lormoral King a écrit :

Hello everyone

Hello.
 

        mi'e Ucauricu'um (I hope I said that right)

.i ko seka'i mi rinsa la .zurzulapitcis. lo litytce pe'u do vau zo'o

mu'o

[Pierre Abbat]

People invent new words fairly often. That doesn't mean that the language is
in flux. The syntax hasn't changed (barring the introduction of some new
selma'o like ZOhOI), nor has the assignment of rafsi to gismu except for one,
"fi'u", where the Book disagreed with the gimste. I've been involved with the
language for over ten years. Sometime before that there was the Great Rafsi
Reallocation, but unless you want to read old works like "ziryroi" (which in
modern Lojban would be "ziryro'i"), you don't have to worry about it.

As to dotside: before dotside, "blabruk" is one word, "labruk" breaks into "la
bruk", and "belarus" breaks into "be la rus". You have to pause after it, but
pausing before is optional. In dotside, all three are one word, but you have
to pause both before and after it.

Some experimental cmavo are used often enough that it's good to know them:
sa'ei (COI): marks the following cmene as an ideophone or onomatopoeia.
la'oi, zo'oi (ZOhOI): quote the following foreign word, which must be
delimited by pauses. The distinction between them is the same as between
"la'o" and "zoi".
mu'ei (ROI): enumerates possible worlds. It's a way to say "if" or "maybe".
lo'ai ... sa'ai ... le'ai: replaces previously said words with other words.

> mi'e Ucauricu'um (I hope I said that right)

It's a valid name, and it resembles your email address, but I have no idea
what it means or what language it's from.

Pierre
--
loi mintu se ckaji danlu cu jmaji

[Lormoral King]

Thanks for the replies so far.

I guess I'll have to dive in more deeply to really understand what all this means however; people are doing different things, yet the language hasn't changed? 

Also, I think I heard the term 'modern lojban' on the facebook lojban group more than once. What could that be about? There seems to be a difference between the description of the language as made by the CLL and that which some seem to be using, or at least so they say. But again, it's hard for me to tell. I'll have to take your word for it.

mi'e Ucauricu'um

[Lormoral King]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 10:30:25 PM UTC+2, iesk wrote:

        mi'e Ucauricu'um (I hope I said that right)

.i ko seka'i mi rinsa la .zurzulapitcis. lo litytce pe'u do vau zo'o

do djuno fi la Zurzulapitcis i mi zanru ledu'u go'i

mi'e Ucauricu'um 

[MorphemeAddict]

Lojban doesn't mark names by capitalization, which is used to indicate stress, although rarely (usually acute accent marks are used). Thus {Ucauricu'um} is stressed on the first 'u' (which is okay if that's how you say it), and {Zurzulapitcis} is not Lojban, despite it following {la}. 

stevo

--

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 12:00 AM, MorphemeAddict <lyt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Lojban doesn't mark names by capitalization, which is used to indicate stress, although rarely (usually acute accent marks are used). Thus {Ucauricu'um} is stressed on the first 'u' (which is okay if that's how you say it), and {Zurzulapitcis} is not Lojban, despite it following {la}. 

Neither of those statements are technically true. Accent instead of capitalization is an accepted though not officially indoctrinated means of marking stress, and marking non-standard stress /at all/ is so rare a thing that "usually" is rather difficult to provide evidence for.

Secondly, saying that a word following la isn't a name merely because it contains a capitalized initial is rather more an opinion than a fact, as camxes is perfectly fine with it.

 

stevo

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Lormoral King <ucaur...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 10:30:25 PM UTC+2, iesk wrote:

        mi'e Ucauricu'um (I hope I said that right)

.i ko seka'i mi rinsa la .zurzulapitcis. lo litytce pe'u do vau zo'o

do djuno fi la Zurzulapitcis i mi zanru ledu'u go'i

mi'e Ucauricu'um 

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--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

[MorphemeAddict]

I accept both of those statements. OTOH, the things I mentioned still mark the text as unusual in Lojban. 

stevo

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 4:31 AM, MorphemeAddict <lyt...@gmail.com> wrote:

I accept both of those statements. OTOH, the things I mentioned still mark the text as unusual in Lojban. 

I agree wrt initial capitalism. I've literally never seen any lojbanist sufficiently capable enough to be beyond the nintadni stage use it, and the example given is the first time I've personally encountered it even as an example.

Capital stress marking, however, I do not find unusual, for at least two reasons: Many people simply cannot /do/ stress marking by the very nature of their keyboard without some kind of special setup (I can /fairly/ easily because I have a program called FreeCompose on my Win-box and have set up the compose function on my *nix-box, so à is simply <Caps>,<A>,<`>) and even then, capital marking is simply easier since A is a single combo keypress (<Shift>+<A>); capital marking is the form chosen by the designers for the simple fact that regardless of medium, if you can type in the Latin script, you most certainly can type capitals, whereas the same is not true for accent marking. (ASCII-only mediums are the obvious example.)

However, I will agree up to these points: {ZARci} has fallen out of practice in favor of {zArci} within capital marking, which is most likely a result of the natural laziness of humankind; {zàrci} does /look/ better than capital marking.

On a slight tangent, has anyone proposed /which/ accent mark to use, or is it still entirely user preference as to which of àãâáäā to use?

[Jorge Llambías]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 7:55 AM, Jonathan Jones <eye...@gmail.com> wrote:

On a slight tangent, has anyone proposed /which/ accent mark to use, or is it still entirely user preference as to which of àãâáäā to use?

The acute accent á is used is Spanish and in Greek to mark stress. I don't know if any of the other marks are used in any language to mark stress.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

 

[Jonathan Jones]

Well, I meant in Lojban, but I guess that's as good a starting point as any.

 

mu'o mi'e xorxes

 

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

Any kind of diacritics on vowels is okay for me for denoting stress. The famous one is of course the one used by selpa'i.

[Pierre Abbat]

On Saturday, October 05, 2013 04:55:28 Jonathan Jones wrote:
> On a slight tangent, has anyone proposed /which/ accent mark to use, or is
> it still entirely user preference as to which of àãâáäā to use?

If I'm using an accent to mark the stress, and the language the name came from
has a simple stress or pitch accent (not different ways a syllable can be
stressed), I always use the acute accent. If it has a tonal pitch accent or is
tonal, I may use more than one accent. If the word doesn't have a stressed
syllable, I'm not sure how to indicate that, as the pronunciation rules
specify which syllable to stress by default.

I have ideas about the default stress (the rules in the Book are incomplete
when cmevla are involved). Should I discuss it openly in the list or privately
with someone (probably xorxes)?

Pierre
--
sei do'anai mi'a djuno puze'e noroi nalselganse srera

[la arxokuna]

Privacy is not the best policy imo.  If this list is inappropriate for such topic fi'o jinvi do then you might wanna use http://mw.lojban.org/index.php/Special:AWCforum/ for that informing others that u posted a question there.