(From Lognet 91/3)
Well, I know that some of you read my ramblings; thank you Steve Rice for the translation of “please pass the (mashed) potatoes”. Actually, Steve and I are finding the electronic medium quite useful for exchanging our notes and even entire files. See this issue’s Lo Cninu Purda—it arrived in Sacramento from Alaska via Internet and Compuserve (CIS), as did the prior LCP, and we didn’t have to lick a single stamp. I am finding CIS to be invaluable for its e-mail, if nothing else. Steve and I seem to exchange e-mail about twice a week. Are any of you already on some electronic service? Please contact me (my CIS address and USPS address are on the back page) so that I may form a consensus about whether or not using CIS (or some other forum) would be of value to the membership at large. Vote early and vote often!
We have a new columnist debuting in this issue, stand up Bill Gober and let the people have a look at you! His new column is the answer to all of us who would like to know how to say it; how to unravel those knotty questions about how to say something or other and to get the grammar correct. Please send questions and other feedback to him via The Institute (address on back cover). If you don’t ask him how to say things, I will and you KNOW how I can be. . .
Speaking of debuts, my eighth grandchild, Lance Christopher Moeller, debuted at 6 pounds 15 ounces at 7:59 a.m. on June 17th. Mother and child doing fine. (Say, there is one of those common phrases I need to put into my phrase book!) Remember, send to Lognet your garden-variety phrases that should be translated into Loglan. If you have already made a translation, please send that along with the original phrase. We’ll get our tourist’s phrase book off the ground in fine shape, this way.
Some of you have begun sending letters directly to me for use in Lognet. Keep it up! The letters still reach me if mailed to The Institute, but this allows me more time to consider my response and may allow a late-arrival to make the next issue instead of the next-after-the-next. Dr. Brown still has a chance to see them; as our production person he has a last look-see at every issue before it goes to bed, so his always useful comments will still be included.
In Lo Lerci this time we have a letter from John Ross that mentions Lojban. That’s right; we are in The Big Time!! We have a knock-off copy of Loglan floating around just like Esperanto has Ido and Nov-Esperanto. The name of this other bunch is “The Logical Language Group” and their language is named 'Lojban'. They have recently been rather active on the networks, especially where Esperanto is active, telling all and sundry that Loglan is dead, or at the very least, terminally ill. More than one person has heard from this very vocal group that we, The Loglan Institute, are no longer active and that Lojban is the only remaining game in town. These persons have sent in money and been deprived of the pleasure of working with the very alive and lively original. LLG has been around for just a few years, but they are claiming all of JCB’s work since 1955 as their own. What gall. I have personal knowledge of this language and will discuss it with anyone who desires further information, but not in these pages. I will not give free advertising to a competitor whose primary technique is plagiarism and whose product lacks any hint of originality. The proper venue for discussing this other language lies elsewhere; we have more important fish to fry here.
Any ideas you may have for Lognet articles are readily welcomed; this is your magazine. Please write.
Ae hapduo lopo logla cirna!
Hue Djim