Re: Criticisms and Parts of Speech

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

>(beginning lojban students may wish to skip towards the end of this
>message for an article on parts of speech that may be helpful.)

This was great!  I wish I'd had some materials like that when I was learning.

A few comments on it:

- It still had a problem I noticed when I was reading the textbook: when you
get talking about sumti, selbri, and bridi the first time, they're all used
intermingled in sentences right off the bat, and it gets a bit bewildering,
since it took me a while to remember which one meant what.
It's good to get students learning the terminology right off, so maybe a
printed version of the textbook ought to have a sidebar with those
definitions on the first few pages where they're used, so they can refer
back to it as they try to plow through the paragraph the first few times.

- I like your alternate form for specifying place structures, although I
think once students get used to it, the traditional form is more compact and
better for reference.  You should also explicitly point out that "x1" is a
notational term for talking about place structures, not a lojban word or
symbol of any kind.

- As for the place structure of sakci (suck); when sucking through a straw
the high pressure area is the beverage and the low pressure area is your
mouth -- you do talk about those when talking about suck; I don't think the
place structure actually implies you have to know/talk about what numeric
value those pressures might have.  It *might* be useful, as you suggest, to
add another place for the portion of the stuff which actually gets sucked
up; but I'd rather make a up a lujvo like sakcylebna (suck-take) or
sakcymuvdu (suck-move) to add that place, rather than changing the gismu
definitions, which are supposed to be more or less fixed by now.

- Have you read the "diagrammed summary" paper?  That's the document I
actually started with, and I found it to be a really good introduction,
especially since it covered a lot of interesting things quickly and broadly,
and satisfied my curiosity about the langugage, so I could decide quickly if
I wanted to study more.  I would like to see something like that as the
first chapter of even natlang textbooks, to give interested students a vague
idea of what's coming in future lessons!
                     ____
 Chris Bogart        \  /  ftp://ftp.csn.net/cbogart/html/homepage.html
 Quetzal Consulting   \/   cbogart@quetzal.com