From Lognet, issue 97/2.
I agree. The interval between March 1997. when you got your last Lognet, and October 1997,when this issue arrived—was unseemlily long. But look at it this way. During this interval you’ve received, ue, La Logli 97/1, the second issue of this new 80-page journal of ours, and it contained the first volume of Steve Rice’s Loglan 3: Understanding Loglan, a feast for sore eyes.
You could also look at it this way: if you had the sort of eyes that could penetrate the corporate veil behind which we (unwillingly) hide, you would find that Vol. 2 of Loglan 3—comprising the next six lessons of Steve’s book, leaving only four to go—is also virtually done. Only “virtually”, because that third 80-page issue is still in Alex Leith’s capable hands, where it is being “finally edited”, the rest of us on the L3 Editorial Team—who are the whole Keugru less our President (whom we relieve of this duty)—having done our heroic best with it.
There were some tough, keugrish issues to settle in the Vol. 2 lessons. Three of them especially took some patient rewriting. (Nemouu, Stiv! But some usages had changed in critical ways since you first wrote these lessons. But, believe me, we tried very hard to follow your laidback, learner-friendly style in contriving these rewrites. You must tell us whether we succeeded!)
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So we’ve been busy, busy, busy around here...although, from the outside, you’d never know it. So busy with Loglan duties, in fact, that all my other projects (lo natra bless them!) have been drying on the vine. Ou. I have plenty of nourishment to pump into them just as soon as this issue of Lognet hits the streets! (I must confess that doing Loglan is fun, though...perhaps more fun than anything else I do.)
Except travel. My wife Evy and I took off about three weeks recently—so recently, in fact, that it was just before putting out this issue of LN—to travel to Alaska and back, the “back” being the fun part. The first eleven days back were by “smallship”: a 200-foot coaster carrying only about 90 passengers and 20 crew, and capable of penetrating every fiord in Alaska’s glac- cier-and-whale country. And the last seven days were by rented car down the Coast Road to San Diego again. Both parts were glorious...though in different ways.
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I have a favor to ask of you...especially if you have not already worked on the Primer Project. Read Vol. 1 of Steve Rice’s Primer. Start reading it now (if you haven’t already). Read it lesson by lesson, as if you were a newcomer. Do the translation exercises at the end of each lesson before passing on to the next. Get a 3X5 card and blank out first one column, then the other, speaking your responses out loud. Do this as many times as you need to, making sure you can translate both columns perfectly before pronouncing a lesson “learned”.
Mark every textual error you encounter in the book, no matter how small...even a missing capital or comma. Comment on every difficulty you experience. Make a note every time you have to do a “double-take” on the meaning of an explanation or definition. Send the results to me; I’ll tally them and see that S gets a copy. You can make your marks and notes (in color, please) directly on your copies of the L3 volumes and send them back to me. I’ll see you get new ones. Or you can send in your “edits” by ordinary mail or e-mail with page, para, and line references.
If you do this for us—and yourself!—I can guarantee that you will be reading Loglan, and probably speaking it, by the end of the third volume. Moreover, if a goodly number of you do this, TLI can then be sure, when it publishes S’s Primer as a book (as it will), that it will be as good a teaching tool as we have collectively been able to make it. Gudcia! —JCB