From Lognet, issue 96/2.
This issue has been delayed for two very delectable reasons, both of which I am sure you’ll savor when you see the results. One, the first third of Steve Rice’s new textbook, Loglan 3: Understanding Loglan, is now being readied for publication; and my editorial assistance was required. It will appear as the second issue of the new La Logli. Two, the first issue of La Logli—which is also being readied by its Editor, Alex Leith—will contain Chapter 2 of Alex’s (I predict soon famous) novelette, “Nepo Neri Vizgoi la Loglandias” (“A first Visit to Loglandia”), and this also required my fine-toothed editorial comb. Each project took a bit of time. And so, LN 96/2 is about two weeks delayed, uu. But if your literary and educational appetites are anything like mine, you’ll be saying Uiui! when you see the works of these two very talented logli...and you will see them both very soon!
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Alex Leith visited my wife Evy and me in San Diego in early February. We (the multiple) did lots of learning, and we (the set) made lots of plans. Among the latter is a scheme for creating an actual community of logli, starting, first, with some “virtual learning-groups”, then moving on to a “virtual speech-community”, and then to some “total immersion” learning experiments by which we hope to bring younger people into our community. The first part of this developing story is told in “New Thoughts on a Loglan Speech Community” in this issue; the second and third parts will probably be told in the next.
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The two other longish articles in this issue are a piece by me, and another by James Jennings, on our several schemes for adding a Loglan subjunctive. Haispe le to sei! Also, you’ll be glad to see, Steve Rice is back with another edition of Lo Cninu Purda. Normally present but missing are (a) a profile by Wes Parsons (there’ll be one on Alex in September’s issue, W tells me), (b) the usual Lo Nurvia Logla (working with Alex on his Chapter 2 used that sort of energy up!), and (c) a Sau La Keugru. You can expect a whopping great edition of that one in LN 96/3. Large things are building in Keugruland; a good many of them should be ready to erect on the Loglandian landscape by September.
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Roy Bigelow, a frequent contributor to Lo Lerci, has made a determined effort to write a grammar of MEX (“ Mathematical EXpressions”), a long-missing piece of our grammar. I’ve sent Roy’s work to Dr. Robert McIvor, our Takrultua (Talk-Rule-Worker = Grammarian), hoping that Bob will be able to find the time —Bob wears more hats, I think, than anyone else in Loglandia!—to get Roy started as a “yaccer”. That’s learning to use LYCES (Loglan Yaccing & Corpus-Eating System), the tool with which we built—and still maintain—the machine grammar of Loglan. What we don’t have yet for the MEX project is a corpus of mathematical statements with indications of how they should be parsed...“Target Parses”, as we call them. With such a corpus and LYCES to “eat” it, a grammar of anything shapes up pretty fast. Anyone willing to help Roy and Bob on this project? Help build that test corpus, for example? It looks like we may be relighting the fire under this project.
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During most of March and part of April my wife Evy and I were traveling in Australia. An amazing country! Aussies are as proud of their public sector as we in the States are contemptuous of ours. (What kind of we is that, I wonder?) In any case, we enjoyed ourselves; but we didn’t have time—or get close enough to any whose addresses we knew—to look up Aussie logli. But we did hear some splendid Aussie uses of the English subjunctive, two of which I’ve used in my article on the subjunctive in this issue.
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Evy and I are double-dipping this year into what amounts to our favorite barrel of late-life experience: traveling. Not only did we spend a month in Australia in early Spring, but we’re going to spend half of July and all of August in Europe. (We’ll be back—icanoi lo natra ga letci—just in time to put out Lognet 96/3 in September. Nipo fatpeo! (Now there’s an Aussie-form expression!)) We’re exchanging houses and cars with a professor and his family in Plymouth, England, and plan to spend at least four of those six weeks in the UK. Then we’ll probably spend a week with friends in northern Spain and another in eastern France (the Rhone Valley) with a logli friend. If there are any (other) logli in these areas who would like to visit or be visited, please let us know.
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We have a lot laid on already for that September issue. There’ll be a paper from one of our lodtua (logic-workers), Emerson Mitchell, on the Lexeme BI and what he feels are some of its current misbehaviors. And E also has some interesting opinions about MEX. Then Randall Holmes, our other lodtua, has promised me a paper on Multiples, Sets & Masses in which he’ll beg to differ with me, soi crano, on several points. Then we should have a mighty Sau La Keugru from Kirk Sattley, for in that busy factory some mighty changes have been brewing.
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Now, about that little Questionnaire you’ve found tucked into this issue. Its origin is this: I raised some questions about our finances with our Disgru (Deciding-Group = Board) the other day, and we all agreed that we ought to open up three new possibilities: (1) subscription without membership; (2) explicit “freebie” status when copies are available; and (3) “please take me off your mailing list”, in addition to our five categories of membership (Honorary, Patron, Sustainer, Regular, Student/Retiree). Please help us sort you out into these eight bins by filling out and returning our questionnaire. It will help us manage TLI’s financial life more serenely.
—Hue Djimbraon