Lojban News

updated 26 May, 2000

What is new on this site - 26 May 2000

Some of the more egregious tiny fonts have been made larger, and news has been updated. The FAQ file has been reviewed.

Lojban attracts Attention - Lojban was mentioned as a discussion item on Slashdot in April. The result was an enormous volume of hits on our website, more traffic than we have seen in two years in just one day, about 1 gigabyte of bandwidth. But our web host CAIS Internet (www.cais.net) stayed up and presumably a lot more people now know about Lojban. After the first week, traffic died down somewhat, but still seems to be running at about double the traditional levels.

To check out the Slashdot discussion see: http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/04/25/1317255.shtml

To look at Lojban web site statistics, see: http://www.lojban.org/stats


LogFest 2000: The annual meeting celebrating Lojban will be held at lojbab's house (2904 Beau Lane Fairfax VA 22031 USA) on the weekend of 5-6 August 2000. The annual meeting of The Logical Language Group, Inc. will be held at 10:30AM EDT at lojbab's house during LogFest. All Lojbanists and prospective Lojbanists at all levels of skill are invited; contact Lojbab for more details.


JCB - Founder of the Loglan Project Dies - Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan and founder of the Loglan Project, died in February while on a cruise around South America. He was 78. On behalf of LLG, Bob LeChevalier has expressed our personal and official sorrow at his passing. While Lojban and LLG were founded as a result of substantive disagreement with JCB over several issues, he was a creative genius who will be greatly missed.

There have been some soundings taken as to the possibility of rapprochement between the TLI Loglan and LLG communities. Both communities seem strongly in favor of the idea, though it is uncertain what types of moves could be made. Discussions will continue over a longer period of time.


Site Revision

This site has been completed revamped as of 26 January 2000. There are numerous minor differences in many information files, in order to enhance consistency. Approximately 20 Megabytes of new material has been added.

Some highlights:

A new home page, with frame and non-frame versions.

The Lojban List FAQ is now the Lojban FAQ, and will be maintained with current information.

This News page will be maintained, and include current project status (also found in the FAQ).

There is a learning Lojban page (now currently a copy of the short FAQ section on that subject) which is intended to guide newcomers and more experienced learners as to what to do next. A volunteer is sought to enhance this section.

Evgueni Sklyanin's Lojban-Links page is copied on this site, with local links where stuff exists on the local Lojban site. A few links were added, deleted, or edited from the original. Over time, the mirror may be maintained, or this site's version may go in different directions.

Text - lojbab's text archive is now on-line. Much of this is old and outdated. But it is all here. Some miscellaneous other texts have been added.

Dictionary - lojbab's current working archive for the dictionary is now on-line. The dictionary files are updated. There is a book skeleton that is archaic, but which embodies the last book outline. There are a few unedited KWIC files that will eventually be added to the main dictionary file. Finally, there are new word frequency lists for the various word categories current to 5 December 1999.. The lujvo word frequency list also contains the latest work done for the lujvo list place structures, as well as thousands of new lujvo that we need volunteers to help define.

JL - all issues of JL, and the latest issue of LK are now available on-line.

Etymologies - the current language population based weights are available.

Software - Some software that had not been linked into the web pages, like Nora's parser/glosser, have been added. LogFlash source is now available on line.

History - A history section has been added with some key documents from relatively ancient times (these may be somewhat obsolete). Minutes for old LLG official meetings, and the Bylaws of LLG are also available here. Also here, per request, is a document with the pre-1993 and post-1993 rafsi side-by-side.

The finalized portions of Robin Turner's minicourse will be mirrored here.

Latest project update to the Lojban FAQ

18. What projects are being worked on? When will they be done?

The Reference Grammar is of course complete and published.

Dictionary - The draft Lojban dictionary is online, compiled primarily by lojbab. It needs to have lujvo and cmavo added to it. Volunteers are welcome at all levels of expertise for lujvo definition work; there are thousands of words to be defined with more created all the time. Nora LeChevalier serves as lead on the lujvo definition project. The set of working files for additions to the dictionary, as of January 2000. .

Introduction - John Cowan is leading the effort to produce a new set of introductory materials that can be published as a cheap book, much less expensively than our current printed introductory material.

Web site - Veijo Vilva maintains the Helsinki web site. lojbab maintains the Lojban File Archive and associated web site. xod maintains the Lojban Web ring, which has sites created by several other Lojbanists. Evgueni Sklyanin maintains a set of links to Lojban Web pages created by several others in the Lojban community; copies of this page of links will be kept on the Lojban File Archive and the Helsinki site because of occasional connectivity problems to the home site in Russia.

FAQ - lojbab now maintains this FAQ, but wants to delegate the job.

Textbook - a draft of the textbook is available online, but it is out of date and incomplete. No one is working on it right now; it's considered fairly low priority until the dictionary is done. The main limitation in the existing draft is that a lot of beginner texts are needed which are both interesting and without use of esoteric features of the language. People tend to move beyond the beginner stage very rapidly once they start trying to use the language non-trivially, and few therefore end up able to confine themselves to the most basic features of the language.

JL and LK - these will resume publication as soon as the LLG address data base is brought up to date, hopefully sometime during the year 2000. Changes and additions were recorded on paper for around 6 years without being entered onto the computer, and we are obliged to account to people for their money balances. This process will start after the completion of this Web page update.

Random Sentence Generator - this is being updated to be consistent with the baselined grammar. The existing program on this site dates back to grammar 2.08, about 8 years old. The update is low priority.

LogFlash 2 - Nora LeChevalier is working on a version of LogFlash for learning rafsi and lujvo-making. The prior version became unmaintainably obsolete in 1989.

LogFlash Language Learning research - lojbab gathers data from all Lojbanists willing to use LogFlash on a systematic basis for a few months. This data will help prove or disprove the meaningfulness of the recognition scores used to create Lojban gismu, and may lead to publishable general research in the field of 2nd language learning. Contact lojbab if interested.

Lojban Adventure - Nick Nicholas translated the text portion of the classic Colossal Cave text adventure game into Lojban several years ago. At the time there were plans to update an old Adventure program to support the new text, but the current state of adventure game design suggests that someone use the game engine called Inform (which has a specific manual for writing adventure games in translation). See the rec.arts.interactive-fiction FAQ, http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq/ and the interactive fiction archive.

Eaton Interface - Helen Eaton's 1930s era list of the most frequently used concepts in 4 European languages has long been a benchmark for completeness of the Lojban lexicon. Volunteers are welcome to translate 1 or more pages of words from this list to Lojban. The file eaton.zip contains word lists by page and proposed TLI Loglan words for each concept (the tanru metaphors for the proposed TLI words are often very poor, but could spark ideas).

Chrestomathy - This is a collection of translated and original writings designed to show a wide sampling of a language. We will want to produce one of these for Lojban after the core language description books are written. We need translations of texts generally a bit longer than the typical effort (1000-10000 words), and as wide a variety of texts and styles, from as many different source languages as possible.

TLI Loglan Interface - If there is ever to be a reunification of the two Loglan language communities, the first step will necessarily be a translation interface mapping words and grammar from TLI Loglan to Lojban (the other direction may also be desirable, but would be more difficult, and we intend to coalesce the community around the Lojban baseline in any event). The first step in this, a mapping of gismu and cmavo, has been done, although there has been no accounting for place structures of the TLI Loglan gismu, and the work may be slightly outdated. See oldlog.txt for the work that has been done.


WHEN?

Projects are all being done by volunteers, and therefore will be done when people finish them. We've promised dates in the past and invariably been wrong. The priorities are for the dictionary and the introductory materials book, with the latter more likely to come out earlier than the former. Publication of books is severely hampered by finances (anyone with money is welcome to donate!), and the lack of ability to publish in the short term has tended to hurt motivation and productivity of those working on those publications.