news and welcome to new people

[cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!lojbab]

We have added several new people to lojban-list, hopefully with good
addresses.  We'll correct any problems as soon as we can.  If you didn't
want to be added, and/or wish to be removed, please send a message so
indicating to lojban-list-request@snark.thyrsus.com with a copy to me if
possible.

Report on LogFair.  We had about a dozen people for most of the weekend,
half were local and half from out-of-town.  As usual, most were far from
skilled in the language, and most left here knowing more than when
they came.

We had bits of Lojban conversation, much talk >about< Lojban and innumerable
side conversations on whatever subjects people wanted to talk about.  Lojban
discussions included place structures, various issues that have been in recent
issues of Ju'i Lobypli, and a translation of 'The Three Bears' by John Cowan,
which hopefully he will post after correcting it and getting it to parse
(hint hint John - but take out the negators first since the parser doesn't
have them yet.)  In any case, we will have the text and a translation in the
next JL.

Finances are still bad; we have now barely paid for the last JL and LK, but
of course have spent some money since then and started out in the hole.  You
will shortly be getting a fund-raising letter from us if you are on our
mailing list and in the US or Canada (non-North Americans will get a similar
notice with their next newsletter.) If we haven't gotten money from you as
of the date we mail the letter to you, you will have been dropped in mailing
level.  If so, we must hear from you, hopefully with money enclosed, to restore
you to a higher level of mailing.  About 110 people are being dropped from
higher levels to level 0 (le lojbo karni only) and about the same number are
being dropped from level 0 to level B (we'll let you know when the textbook is
published).

Other news:

Speaking of the textbook, I've got about 60 pages done, and reviewers at
LogFair have rated it an outstanding improvement over the draft lessons.  I'll
have more information on this in the next newsletter.

In addition to Compuserve, I have found out how to mail to Fidonet nodes, and
will be adding a couple of these people to lojban-list, when I find out their
addresses.  If you know of any Fidonet people we should add, let me know.

John Cowan has substantially completed a simplified BNF form of the machine
grammar, only 4 pages long, and is working on a textual catalog describing
each of the lexemes (which we are now calling "selma'o" when I remember the
word, which refers to the second sumti of "cmavo", the 'cmavo grammatical
category'.  We've been calling this 'lexeme' somewhat incorrectly because
Jim Brown did so; the proper English jargon is apparently 'grameme', which is
equally obscure to most readers.  So we might as well use a Lojban word and
advance the language.

John Cowan has edited the sci.lang discussion of Lojban and Sapir-Whorf (and
a few other things including Esperanto) into a series of 'conversations'. We
hope to have these posted to the Planned Languages file server in a few weeks,
as well as to offer them in hard-copy.

-lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
          2904 Beau Lane Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA  703-385-0273