Talk:Lojban/Archive proposals

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

Name derivation
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)

Longer Lojban text
Please, could you offer some longer text, in order to get a feel for Lojban? Maybe a well known text, like the Lords Prayer or the beginning of the Declaration of Independce of the USA, or something. Thanks. --denny vrande&#269;i&#263; 01:02, Feb 28, 2004 (UTC)


 * Lord's prayer in Lojban is on the Esperanto wiki. Other translations are at the official Lojban homepage. I don't think the latter is appropriate to add under the "External links" section, since the main page of the same site already appears there. arj 21:23, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

How to introduce an article
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)


 * Quite right. I clarified the passage on rafsi in this article, and a bit of work had already been done on rafsi.&mdash;Nat Krause(Talk!) 07:04, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Clarity

 * la lojban. .ue mo


 * (Lojban [surprise] what is it?)

The above, IMHO, simply does not convey information in a clear, simple way that can be expected out of encyclopedia articles, so I have removed it. It also doesn't (clear) convey any information that is not inferrable from the fact that this is, after all, an encyclopedia article about Lojban! --LMS

Vocabulary
There should be a more thorough section about how vocabulary was, is and will be created, because it would be interesting for the accidental viewer, just as for somebody wanting to compare it to other auxlangs and Euroclones.

(From http://neptune.spaceports.com/~words/lojban.html )


 * Constructed languages create words in two main ways. There are some, mainly fictional languages like Elvish or Klingon, which make up all the words from scratch. Most international languages, however, take their vocabulary from existing languages (in practice, European languages) and sometimes modify them to suit the spelling and grammar of the new language - Esperanto is a good example. Lojban falls half way between the two.


 * The root words (gismu in Lojban) were created by a computer from words in the six most widely-spoken languages in the world: Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. This is one of the advantages of Lojban - it doesn't give a privileged position to European languages. These are also languages that have had a lot of words in common other languages; for example, French and Italian share a lot of words with Spanish, and although Turkish is not on the list, I found in Lojban a lot of elements of Turkish which had come in from Arabic and Persian (which is quite close to Urdu). And of course English words like "television" and "taxi" have spread all over the world.


 * All root words have five letters. For example:

* prenu - person * cukta - book * vanju - wine


 * Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has the "per" of English "person" and the ren of Chinese. cukta has the "ook" of English "book", all of Chinese shu(c is pronounced "sh"), and part of Arabic (and Turkish) kitap. vanju is like French vin and Chinese jiu. This makes learning words easier for the largest number of people.

(Arguably, this would make the vocabulary indiscriminately difficult for everybody, rather than being easier for people already familiar with Latin, English etc. It could be argued which approach would be the best in practice)

Lojban vs Loglan
I'm a little confused on the topic of Lojban vs. Loglan. I think a comparison article or chart would be of very much help. Mkoval 22:11, 30 Dec 2003 (UTC)
 * Wiki:Lojban vs Loglan comparison, look also at loglanic texts on www.loglan.org --ilya 06:51, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I included the comparison link in the main text. It's not so easy to understand by someone with little backgroud, so I think a simple comparison in Wikipedia is still warranted. Mkoval 07:36, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * I am in the process of writing a section on this. Expect it to be added during the next week. arj 21:18, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * Done. arj 13:43, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

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)

Lojban words for parts of speech
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)


 * 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)


 * I've played around with the text a little; what do you think of it now? -- pne 10:10, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Are there any synonyms for these Lojban terms in mainstream linguistics? It always bothers me that Lojban grammar seems to be discussed in internal terms or in reference to English, but rarely with explicit reference to other languages.--Chris 17:33, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Linking Lojban Pages
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, Manat is the code for the Norwegian version, and no.wikipedia.org is that Wikipedia's location. But for Taiwanese, H& 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)

Lojban edition of Wikipedia
Is there any need to start a Lojban edition of Wikipedia? Mkoval 22:11, 30 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I think this will be done exactly when some significant amount of people will speak Lojban. We then
 * create computer words in Lojban
 * port here existing wikis and texts
 * port here archives of lojban@yahoogroups.com
 * ilya 06:51, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Meanwhile, documentation-happy Lojbanists can go to the Lojban wiki or the Lojban dictionary project. arj 17:11, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I added the link to the Lojban dictionary to the main text. Mkoval 07:42, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Recreate Category: Lojban?
On 27 September 2006 I nominated Category:Lojban for deletion with the following reasoning:
 * Very small category with little hope for expansion. Currently has four entries (Attitudinal indicator, List of common phrases in constructed languages, Lojban, and Hartmut Pilch). Of these, I see only the articles Lojban and Attitudinal indicator as belonging in this category. Other articles discussing Lojban specifics are probably off-topic on wikipedia and better suited for the Lojban wiki.

There was little further discussion, Attitudinal indicator was merged back into Lojban, and the category was deleted on 4 October 2006. Now that we have separate pages on gismu, selbri, jbonunsla, and sumti I wonder if it would make sense to recreate the category. What do the other wikipedians think? &mdash;Tobias Bergemann 11:50, 8 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't see what's wrong with having List of common phrases in constructed languages and Hartmut Pilch in a Category:Lojban if it exists. The former is probably Wikipedia's 2nd biggest source of information on Lojban, and the latter is a noted Lojbanist. However, I'm not sure we should whether we should have a category. Maybe we should just merge those articles into this one (jbonunsla for sure).&mdash;Nat Krause(Talk!) 01:09, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Aargh, Common phrases in constructed languages was deleted. Thanks, Wikipedia! Luckily, I was able to salvage the relevant text from Citizendium and will add it back to this article.&mdash;Nat Krause(Talk!) 01:14, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * When I nominated the category for deletion Attitudinal indicator was already nominated for merging back into Lojban, and it wasn't clear to me that Hartmut Pilch is in fact a noted Lojbanist. All that the wikipedia page about Hartmut Pilch says about his relation to Lojban is: "He is also a student of Lojban, a constructed language." On his homepage at a2e.de he writes "I haven't progressed very far with Lojban yet, although it embodies much of my ideals of verbal communication."
 * I think a category for Lojban would make sense if there are more than, say, three or four separate articles about the language and the culture that surrounds it. &mdash;Tobias Bergemann 10:30, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I think for Category:Lojban to be re-created, we'd need at least five articles that are completely about Lojban (which we do — Lojban, gismu, selbri, jbonunsla, sumti, and rafsi is already six — though I'm not actually sure all of those deserve to be separate articles), at least ten articles that are very much connected to Lojban (the above plus Loglan make eight; are there others?), and an expectation that at least ten more worthwhile articles could be written that are completely about Lojban (preferably with a concrete list of ten redlinks that we think should become their own articles). If that's not the case, then Lojban's "See also" section should more than subsume Category:Lojban. —RuakhTALK 22:14, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't see 15 Lojban-specific articles happening any time soon. I agree with your idea that we should, at least, have a list of redlinks on hand for topics that would make good articles, before we proceed to re-create the category. It's interesting to note that the Chinese Wikipedia article on lojban has a separate article on Lojban grammar.


 * I think it's reasonable to include Lojbanists in Category:Lojban, if the category exists, and if the people have articles about them already. The only things I know about Hartmut Pilch are the things I learned from the Wall Street Journal article about him, which thought his interest in Lojban was interesting to include a short glossary of a few Lojban words alongside the article.


 * The current Loglan article is mostly about TLI Loglan; it might be offensive to add it a Lojban category.&mdash;Nat Krause(Talk!) 00:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Merging
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)

The only reason I can see to merge them is that the page on attitudinals is really short. Better, in my opinion, would be to mark it as a stub and not merge. --Vishahu 17:57, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Splitting
I suggest to split the Grammar section from this article, leaving a summarized version of it. --Mednak 16:32, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * 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)


 * I have created a new page dedicated to Lojban grammar. --Mednak 00:59, 11 August 2007 (UTC)


 * 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)

Copyright/License
I just realized that the following is a mere adaptation--made by myself as it happens (I should have checked it for possible copyright problems)--of the text on http://www.lojban.org. There is a license of sorts on the website, but I believe that we can't use it on Wikipedia according to that license. Please, please, whoever uploaded this text, whenever you copy text from another source, please discuss why you've done so and your permissions/rights to do so on the /Talk page. --LMS


 * I think I can safely say that the Logical Language Group would be amenable to giving the Wikipedia permission to copy their text and redistribute it under the GFDL. Email webmaster@lojban.org and ask for permission. -Jay

As the President of the Logical Language Group, I have no trouble authorizing the use of this or any other text in Wikipedia. I will post to the LLG's board to make sure there are no objections. --John Cowan

Number of gismu

 * 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)


 * No, that list of gismu also includes cmavo if they have rafsi.&mdash;Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 07:44, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmm, you're right. The document's name is misleading, then. - furrykef (Talk at me) 05:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * .ie&mdash;Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 05:30, 2 August 2007 (UTC)