WWW server announcement

[veion@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi]

Having received no negative comments from the list I decided
to go ahead with the publication of the server. The server has
actually been semi-public for a few days. I planted a few links
to my server at a graphical WebWorld server. The people accessing
my server through the links only knew that they were accessing
"The Lojban Archive", nothing else. I wanted to see how many
of them would access several pages. Well, most of them read
just the index page but a few accessed more - one even came
back later on. I'll prepare a report in a couple of weeks.
I can tell the original source of information from the log
trace (List/WebWorld/News).

   Veijo

Here is the News article:

>From news.helsinki.fi!xiron.pc.helsinki.fi!vilva Mon May 30 21:28:59 1994
Path: news.helsinki.fi!xiron.pc.helsinki.fi!vilva
From: vilva@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi (Veijo Vilva)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www
Subject: ANNOUNCE: The Lojban WWW Server
Date: 30 May 1994 18:21:54 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 79
Message-ID: <2sdas2$drm@kantti.Helsinki.FI>
NNTP-Posting-Host: xiron.pc.helsinki.fi
Summary: announcing the Lojban WWW Server
Keywords: constructed languages, planned languages, artificial languages,
          WWW server
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]


                 la lojban po'u le logji bangu
                 Lojban - The Logical Language

An experimental WWW server for material concerning the constructed/
planned/artificial language Lojban is available for public access
at

<a href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";>The Lojban Archive</a>

The server contains language description material, machine grammars
(both Extended BNF and YACC versions), complete vocabularies and links
to available software, learning material and Lojban texts.
 

             la lojban mo    ---    What is Lojban?

Lojban (/LOZH-bahn/) is a constructed language.  Originally called
"Loglan" by project founder Dr. James Cooke Brown, who started the
language development in 1955, the language goals were first described
in the article "Loglan" in Scientific American, June, 1960.

Loglan/Lojban has been built over three decades by dozens of workers
and hundreds of supporters, led since 1987 by The Logical Language
Group.

There are many artificial languages, but Loglan/Lojban has been 
engineered to make it unique in several ways.  The following are the
main features of Lojban:

 - Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with 
   each other, and possibly in the future with computers.

 - Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.

 - Lojban grammar is based on the principles of logic.

 - Lojban has an unambiguous grammar.

 - Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of 
   sounds into words.

 - Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy
   to learn.

 - Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a
   vocabulary of millions of words.

 - Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without
   exception.

 - Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and
   clear thought and communication.

Lojban was originally designed for the purpose of supporting research
on a concept known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: "the structure of a
language constrains the thinking of people using that language".

Lojban allows the full expressive capability of a natural language,
but differs in structure from other languages in major ways.  This 
allows its use as a test vehicle for scientists studying the
relationships between language, thought, and culture.

Lojban was designed as a human language, and not as a computer language.
It is therefore intended for use in conversation, reading, writing, and
thinking.  However, since Lojban can be processed by a computer much more
easily than can a natural language, Lojban-based computer applications
are a natural expectation.  Due to its unambiguous grammar and simple
structure, it can be easily parsed by computers, making it possible for
Lojban to be used in the future for computer-human interaction, and
perhaps conversation.  Lojban's predicate structure is similar to Prolog,
suggesting it as a powerful tool in AI processing, especially in the
storing and processing of data about the world and people's conceptions
of it.  Linguists are interested in Lojban's potential as an intermediate
language in computer-aided translation of natural languages.  Other people
are interested in Lojban as an international language.

      e'osai ko sarji la lojban  ---  Please! support Lojban!