Talk:Lojban/Archive 1

message: I think the section about difference between Lojban and Loglan is too large and insignificant to the article. Imagine you are a person who has never heard of Lojban, and wants to know about it. Why should it read these technical details about another language that may be regarded as dead? Inego 02:53, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comparison with Loglan

message: Pne, I agree that the wording you removed was a little awkward. But people who are not acquainted with Lojban will not know what gismu means. I'm tempted to just revert it, since the old information gives more information, but I suppose there might be a way to work in some info on what a gismu is earlier in the article. arj 21:51, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, well, I think the old information was inaccurate - the term brivla is defined in the article, but brivla in general don't have rafsi. I agree that keeping it in would provide information, but then the bit about "zero to three three-letter abbreviations" or whatever it was would need to be rephrased. -- pne 09:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: I've played around with the text a little; what do you think of it now? -- pne 10:10, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lojban words for parts of speech (brivla, gismu, cmavo, fu'ivla, etc.) 

message: A much nicer version is at:
http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/pixra:Lojbancmalu.png
Kim Bruning 19:29, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Lojban logo

message: This is a technical problem regarding the Lojban Wikipedia, and I'll use the page Manatee to demonstrate.  Normally, when one wants to link to a page in another language, the name of the other Wikipedia suffices.  For instance, no:Manat is the code for the Norwegian version, and no.wikipedia.org is that Wikipedia's location.  But for Taiwanese, minnan:Hái-gû is correct, even though the Taiwanese Wikipedia is at zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org.  As you can see, jbo is not the correct code for Lojban, since the link appears at the bottom of the page rather than at the left.  What is it, then?
: My guess is that it is correct (it is the correct ISO code, after all), but that it has been disabled on en: because of political reasons, to discourage interwiki linking to jbo:. I believe the same thing happens at present with tlh: as well. arj 15:08, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Linking Lojban Pages

message: What's "alga"? I've never heard of this, or any other shorter-than-five-letters brivla.
: I believe it means "alga". arj 18:53, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  alga 

message: As a neophyte in this area, I may be stepping unknowingly into a well-worn controversy, but the following struck me immediately as potentially POV:
:... an artificial language like Lojban, that is capable of expressing all the nuance and subtlety of the natural languages we are familiar with ...
I imagine many natural-language poets would contest this statement, since many poetic effects are based on deliberate ambiguity. If Lojban truly does achieve the goal of having "mathematically inviolate grammar and spelling rules [that] remove all possible confusion about what a sentence is trying to say," then it would seem to be incapable of ambiguity. Original Lojban poetry would lack the ability to use ambiguity as a communicative device. And (considering this in the abstract, since I've never attempted it) I would expect that much natural-language poetry could not be satisfactorily translated into Lojban.
The premise seems to be that ambiguity is inherently bad. It is certainly bad in some contexts, but in others it is powerful and evocative. --Sharpner 20:21, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "... all the nuance and subtlety of the natural languages ..." 

message: MattisManzel 13:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  automatic translation 

message: The article Context-free_grammar states that Lojban's grammar is context-free. I would think that elidability of terminators possibly makes it context-sensitive. Icek 12:21, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Context-free grammar? 

message: Does Lojban have punctuation? -- Beland 16:57, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Short answer: no. arj 17:55, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Done. arj 17:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questions 

message: The editor who suggested for attitudinal indicator to be merged in here didn't state a reason for doing so. Seeing as the tag has stood for months, and this article here is quite long already, I'm inclined to just remove the merge tag. Any opinions? arj 10:41, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Attitudinal indicators 

message: Does anyone know where the name "Lojban" comes from?  If so, please add it to the article. —Steve Summit (talk) 13:41, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  name derivation? 

message: If the language has no adjectives or adverbs, then how do I indicate that my ideas are both colorless and green, and that they sleep furiously, as opposed to sleeping in some other fashion? --Carnildo 07:23, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: IMO the answer to this goes beyond the scope of an encyclopedia article. If someone wants to try to work it into the article, the relevant place in the reference grammar is Chapter 5, section 6. arj 09:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adjectives and adverbs? 

message: === Why is there several sounds? ===
I had high hopes for lojban and am quite disappointed by the fact it does not enforce one sound per letter. .a'o may by both "aho" (like bowl) or "ahɔ" (like hot) and still refer to the same thing (hope).
Also, it is not context-free, at least for the letters i and u.
Even some traditional languages such as Serbian (and most Slavic languages come close to it) enjoy univalence between phonemes and graphemes. Such a thing appears to me as fundamental for an ambitious (and non-ambiguous) language.
Any reason for this?David Latapie (✒ | @) 15:12, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I do not understand the complain. Every language I know of has different pronunciations possible for many phonemes. If I understand lojban correctly, every letter has one corresponding sound and vice versa. The sound itself can be pronounced with different "accents" to accommodate speakers of widely different origins. 8 Jan 2007. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 195.212.29.75 (talk • contribs).
=== Usefulness of explicit glottal stop? ===
Also, wouldn't it be better to just decide there is no liaison in lojban? I am a French native speaker and we use the glottal stop exclusively to avoid liaison (like hérisson [leading glottal stop] vs. horreur [no leading glottal stop]). Consequently, I may misunderstand the function of the glottal stop; is it a sort of “syllable separator”? Please notify me of any other use for this “sound”.David Latapie (✒ | @) 15:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Sorry for saying so, but you seem to be confused on a few fronts. Firstly, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of a talk page, which is to discuss how to improve the article. Even if everyone here were to agree with you that Lojban had the problems you perceive, that wouldn't really affect the article. Secondly, you seem to misunderstand the meaning of the term phoneme; Lojban does indeed have a one-to-one grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, [ɔ] and [o] being alternative realizations of the same phoneme. Thirdly, you seem to misunderstand the nature of the glottal stop; it is simply a consonant. In some languages, it can be inserted epenthetically; this is the case in French (well, most dialects), where it's inserted to produce hiatus when liaison is forbidden (especially before so-called h aspiré), as well as in English, where it appears phrase-initially if no other consonant is present. In other languages, it does not exist at all; I don't think Italian has glottal stops at all. And in yet others, it's simply a normal consonant. (As used in those languages, it might well sound like a "syllable separator" to a French or English speaker, but that's a consequence of how French and English use the sound, not something inherent in the sound.) —RuakhTALK 01:07, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Perceived weaknesses in Lojban 

message: Also, wouldn't it be better to just decide there is no liaison in lojban? I am a French native speaker and we use the glottal stop exclusively to avoid liaison (like hérisson [leading glottal stop] vs. horreur [no leading glottal stop]). Consequently, I may misunderstand the function of the glottal stop; is it a sort of “syllable separator”? Please notify me of any other use for this “sound”.David Latapie (✒ | @) 15:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry for saying so, but you seem to be confused on a few fronts. Firstly, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of a talk page, which is to discuss how to improve the article. Even if everyone here were to agree with you that Lojban had the problems you perceive, that wouldn't really affect the article. Secondly, you seem to misunderstand the meaning of the term phoneme; Lojban does indeed have a one-to-one grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, [ɔ] and [o] being alternative realizations of the same phoneme. Thirdly, you seem to misunderstand the nature of the glottal stop; it is simply a consonant. In some languages, it can be inserted epenthetically; this is the case in French (well, most dialects), where it's inserted to produce hiatus when liaison is forbidden (especially before so-called h aspiré), as well as in English, where it appears phrase-initially if no other consonant is present. In other languages, it does not exist at all; I don't think Italian has glottal stops at all. And in yet others, it's simply a normal consonant. (As used in those languages, it might well sound like a "syllable separator" to a French or English speaker, but that's a consequence of how French and English use the sound, not something inherent in the sound.) —RuakhTALK 01:07, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usefulness of explicit glottal stop? 

message: A couple suggestions:
1- When describing a new language in a Wikipedia article written in English, do not describe the language in terms of words from the language itself. Example:
Etymology of the name
The name of the language, Lojban, is a combination of {loj} and {ban}, which are rafsi for {logji} and {bangu}, meaning "Logical" and "Language", respectively.
So what the heck is a rafsi? I'm sure it makes perfect sense to the author of the article, but those who are just getting started trying to learn about it, it's a little discouraging when the article starts off confusing. According to Wikipedia,
rafsi is a morphology term pertaining to artificial language Lojban. 
(Not very helpful so far.) 
In Lojban, all gismu and many cmavo have special forms, called rafsi, by combining which it is possible to create new selbri and names.
OK, this brings me to point #2
2- When defining a word from a new language in a Wikipedia article written in English, do not define the word using other words from this new language. For example:
I have a new language, Snospmis. The name Snonspmis comes from the kitu of pine trees. What is or are kitu you ask? Kitu are kind of like stolgib, only moreso xilften.
See?
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.184.121.215 (talk • contribs).
:Agreed. —RuakhTALK 01:10, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite right. I clarified the passage on rafsi in this article, and a bit of work had already been done on rafsi.—Nat Krause(Talk!) 07:04, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestions 

message: I've got the following from the on-line Reference Grammar, Chapter 3, Section 3, eighth paragraph:
:"It is always legal to use the apostrophe (IPA [h]) sound in pronouncing a comma."
-- Dissident (Talk) 18:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Pronouncing the comma

message: Anyone know if there's an abstract noun marker? Is nominalization possible in this language?
There are twelve abstractors.  arj 09:24, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Abstract noun marker

message: The claim that the Lojban freeze will expire in 2003 is outdated. The freeze period was effectively extended in 2002, see . arj 20:18, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for telling me that. I corrected the date. --Mednak 16:18, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Baseline inaccuracy 

message: I suggest to split the Grammar section from this article, leaving a summarized version of it. --Mednak 16:32, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I second that. It seems the article jumps directly into trying to teach someone Lojban, rather than just explaining the history/concept of it. Miggyb 19:17, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have created a new page dedicated to Lojban grammar. --Mednak 00:59, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have summarized each section of Grammar in this article. We may of course keep further editing them; but as for some particular additional content please put it in the external Lojban grammar. --Mednak 11:16, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Splitting 

message: :There are 1342 canonical gismu.
I count 1436: http://www.lojban.org/publications/wordlists/gismu.txt has 1438 lines. Subtract one line for the header and one for the blank line at the end, and you have 1436. It looks to me that every single other line defines a gismu. - furrykef (Talk at me) 07:30, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, that list of gismu also includes cmavo if they have rafsi.—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 07:44, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, you're right. The document's name is misleading, then. - furrykef (Talk at me) 05:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: .ie—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 05:30, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of gismu