Re: Hello from a newbie

The reference grammar is still a (very) draft document, and no one has
started to format it yet.  John Cowan who is writing it, uses a straight
ASCII editor.  Therefore there should be no problems with print format
without doing any formatting.  Are you having any problems?

The problem with formatting it now is that Cowan occasionally makes
changes to the raw, unformatted file, since he is still the one that
maintains them, and for the most part, i haven't even looked at them for
publishing yet.  Thus any formatting you do is a one time effort that is
likely obsolete within a few months.

If you decide to do any formatting, Word for Windows is the best way to
go if you want to maximize recovery of your efforts, since Cowan and I
both use WfW for our formatted efforts.  Unfortunately, of course, the
Unix-based people who seem to be about half of our audience on the List
cannot do anything with WfW stuff, and generally prefer TeX/LaTeX
formatting, which the people of the MS-DOS world find less than useful
most of the time.  But even using WfW is not guaranteed to make your
stuff reusable.  The draft tense chapter of the reference grammar was
formatted and published as part of an issue of Ju'i Lobypli a couple of
years ago, but the formatted version is not being supported since Cowan
has made heavy changes to the unformatted text.  At this point, only the
tense and negation papers of the reference grammar are available in
(formatted) print, and in both cases those are old versions of the
document.

Of course, coming from the Loglan world, using obsolete reference
materials is the norm, since even the latest edition of L1 (which was
poorly edited) has been made obsolete by countless undocumented or
minimally documented changes to the language.  We don;t have formatted
printed documents, for some stuff, but the reference grammar and the
YACC grammar pretty much constitute our current language definition and
are thus ARE the standard for what the language is right now.

Since you say you are familiar with Loglan, BTW, you are already
familiar with Lojban.  The words have changed, but given direct word
substitution of Lojban words for most TLI Loglan words, will give you a
text with nearly identical grammar and semantics in most cases.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
 For the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, see ftp.cs.yale.edu  /pub/lojban
    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";
Cc: lojban