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    This is going to be a little long.  First, I'd like to thank all
the cardinals who responded to my previous postings:  the comfy chair
was very nice, and of course quite unexpected.  I'd have gotten back
to you sooner, but I had a column to write for Lognet.  In fact, it
turns out that I'm going to be so busy with Loglan, I won't have much
time for keeping track of this list, so I'll be unsubscribing.  I'll
pop in from time to time, though, and of course anyone who wants to
yak may send me a message.  Please let me know whether your message is a copy
of a posting or personal (but not too personal!) so I'll know how to respond.
I'll get back to you as soon as possible, though I need to pick up Anglo-Saxon
by the fall semester, and I promised jimc I'd learn -gua!spi, so I may not be
very prompt.  (Kvetch, kvetch!  That's all he ever does!)

    I have noticed a distressingly rude habit in some of these
postings:  referring to Loglan as "Institute Loglan."  Now, if you
wish to entertain the notion that "Loglan" is a generic term, fine;
though it is ambiguous and quite unnecessary.  The generic term
"predlang" already exists, and is more precise. After all, there have
been several "logical languages" in the past few centuries.  The
distinctive feature of Loglan and Lojban is use of predicates.
(There's an enormous differrence between predicate-oriented and
non-predicate-oriented languages.)  I should also point out that,
contrary to what you may have heard, the legal status of "Loglan" is
as yet undecided.

    Anyway, to give you some idea how petty and obnoxious "Institute
Loglan" looks to a logli, for the remainder of this message I will
refer to "Group Lojban."  Again, I do this not to be testy, but to
give you a mirror in which to see yourselves.  If you feel that it is
justifiable to take over from TLI a term which it originated, used as
a special term unchallenged for some thirty years, and has never
ceased to use in that fashion in copyrighted works, your ethical
system and mine are too far apart for us to even discuss matters.

    Phonemics and transcribing the digraph:  It's easy enough to find
minimal pairs for epsilon and the digraph in English, though I still
think mapping three English phonemes onto one Group Lojban phoneme is
asking for trouble.  In particular, I'd point out that it's rather
hard to find minimal pairs for epsilon and the digraph in English
names, but quite easy to find such pairs for the phonemes mapped onto
Group Lojban "a":  Don/Dan, Jack/Jock, etc.  When I first saw "salis",
I took it as the Group Lojban version of "Solly".

    In referring to problems in deriving primitive predicates, I
relied on your own gismu list.  If "censa" neither contains nor
resembles the English word "sacred", then the English word is
worthless as a mnemonic.  On a similar note, it's unreasonable to
expect an ordinary English-speaker to hear a /i/ in "later", as is
apparently required for "balvi" to work.

    When I saw "baxso", I thought you might have taken it from
"bahasa"--and almost died laughing.  Then I said to myself, "Nah, they
wouldn't do THAT!  They must be using some other word."  I'm sorry I
doubted you.

    Identities:  You seem to be committing ther same mistake as some
Transformational-Generative people I've encountered:  confusing a
model of grammar with grammar itself.  Loglan is a real language, so
it and its grammar are found not on some computer but in the minds of
Loglanists.  You might as reasonably confuse a sqare and a rectangle:
all square are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.  If an
utterance is grammatical, it will parse; but not all that parses is
grammatical in terms of The Grammar as known by speakers.  Otherwise,
you don't have a language, just a linguistic computer game.  (Let me
know whether you win or the Klingons do.)

    It's true that the computer sees "bi" as a type of predicate
LEXEME, but that's not to say that "bi" is a predicate in speakers'
minds.  It isn't in mine, for example.

    Another example of this confusion is Cowan's recent claim that a
mathematical identity such as "Lio topoito bi lio fo" (2+2=4--I don't
recall his example right off) is a predication, a "fact" of
mathematics.  I would suggest that, while you may be in a position to
pontificate about Group Lojban semantics, before doing so about
Loglan, you should bother to learn the language.  The utterance in
question is an identity, not a claim, though a claim could be
constructed quite easily in Loglan, and probably in Group Lojban as
well.  I won't insult your intelligence by explaining further; if the
method's obvious to a mere Loglanist, it must be self-evident to Group
Lojbanists.

    In fact, based on this and other instances of pseudo-Loglan, I can see why
Brown's bugged.  I thought it was a mere matter of having the Institute's work
ripped off.  But now I think rather that he's (justifiably) afraid that you're
contaminating the experimental area--spitting in the test-tube, so to speak--by
misrepresenting Loglan semantics and metaphysics.  Do what you will with
Lojban, but please have the courtesy to leave Loglan out of it.

    Passing thoughts:  I'm less of a Zipfoid than most of the people
at TLI, though I acknowledge the general validity of his views.  lojbab says
that Loglan's case tags are bad (Bad tags! Bad tags!) on three counts:

1.  Linguists can't agree on how many cases there are.  True from the
standpoint of universal grammar, false from the standpoint of a given
language (e.g., Loglan).  It's not too hard to figure out how many
cases a language needs to account for its syntax.  The trick is coming
up with a system which works for everybody.  Now, Loglan is A
language, not ALL languages, so there's no problem.

2.  The tags create a duality in the language.  So what?  Optionality
is the name of Loglan's game, and I rather like having the choice.  I
think more languages have redundancy of this sort than anyone's aware
of; if Group Lojban doesn't, my condolences.

3.  The case system isn't "intuitive."  I suspect that lojbab means
"requiring no intuition or imagination" here; Loglan's case tags are
plenty intuitive.  Tell me, how many declension-happy languages do you
know?  From my experience with Latin, (Koine) Greek, and Russian, I'd
say the system's pretty reasonable.  It's about on a par with that of
Japanese, which it somewhat resembles.

    I'm also informed that Group Lojban doesn't have the full spectrum
of ethnic forms found in Loglan.  Using *lojb- as an example, we'd
have

         lojba     is a part of the Group Lojban language
         lojbe     is an area associated with Group Lojbanists
         lojbi     is a Group Lojbanist
         lojbo     is a feature of Group Lojban culture
         (No -u form exists as of now.)

In Group Lojban, such concepts are handled with complexes ("lujvo" is
the local shibboleth, I think).  Now, I can write (and even say, but
not in a mail message)

         lojbyleu       is a part of the Group Lojban language
         lojbysia       is an area associated with Group Lojbanists
         lojbypeu       is a Group Lojbanist
         lojbykultu     is a feature of Group Lojban culture

and even lojbykau ("is a Group Lojban dog") if I wish.  I haven't been
struck by fire from heaven, and I give you my word that I haven't been
transmogrified into a giant can of Spam.  So apparently I can do in
Loglan exactly what you do in Group Lojban.  In effect, you're telling
me that as a Loglanist, I have more choices than you Group Lojbanists
do.  Whillikers, fellers, I'm crushed.

In parting, I leave you with the words of the great philosopher Marx:

    "Loi.  I oa mi godzi. I oa no mi stolo. I mi kamla rau lepo cutse
lepo mi godzi.  I ui mi kamla.  Ibuo oa mi godzi.  I loa!"

    (If anyone has better luck with the meter and/or rhyme scheme, I'd
like to know about it.)

Sia loa, hue Stiv Rais