(From Lognet 91/4)
Well, here it is again, time for ramblings from Tisra. We have a nice assortment of letters from various readers and the usual sterling work from RAM, Kirk Sattley and Bill Gober. There's no Lo Cninu Purda column this time, so we’ll have to manage with the old words for now. Steve has given us an abundance of specialized new words over the past few Lognets and I, for one, haven’t assimilated them into my thought processes yet. Bill Gober’s column gets right down to the brass tacks of usage of Logan predicates. Great work, Bill, keep it up!
This column is being written in the study of Gandias Braon in San Diego. A finer locale for this type of work would be hard to imagine. We are hammering out the details of creating/printing/distributing Lognet for those months that he will be sailing his boat from the Florida coast to the Pacific coast by way of the Panama canal. We do not wish any columns to miss any deadlines. This includes Sau La Sacdonsu...so we are examining the possibility of using cellular telephone plus laptop computer from the boat to stay in touch!!
Our CompuServe connection is really turning out to be a wonderful new tool and just might turn out to be useful in the context of staying in touch with Dr. Brown as well. The wonders of modern technology just keep on amazing me.
Speaking of CompuServe, many logli of The Institute are now active on CIS and, when we reach critical mass (whatever that might be), I’m sure we will begin to have some dandy discussions in The Foreign Language Forum, “Other Languages” section. There was a short-lived discussion in that area for a few weeks, but the initial number of persons involved in the thread was too low to keep it going and the thread rolled off after a week or so.
There is interest on Internet as well. America Online has also become a medium of information exchange between those interested in Loglan and those with knowledge of the language. In particular, the “What is Loglan” item has been posted and is being downloaded by various and sundry. It will be interesting to note in future months what growth derives from this flurry of electronic activity.
Technology is making other inroads that I find interesting and will share with you. The magazine “Technology Review”, edited at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology—incidentally, this is the magazine in which Whorf published his first "whorfian" articles—raises in its October 1991 issue some new information about the innateness of human language. In short, Noam Chomsky’s long-standing theory that language is an innate feature of the human condition is receiving some interesting corroboration from a new series of computer programs that seem to model the human mind in its ability to parse sentences. These programs are using a rule list that numbers around 25 and are doing fascinating work in parsing languages as disparate as English, Spanish, German and Japanese. Read the article if you can find a copy. It’s very interesting.
Another interesting technological sidetrack is that there is a group in Mexico looking into cultural design as a possible tool for space exploration and they have the Loglan Institute’s software and book set to study the possible incorporation of a planned language in the overall cultural design. They understand that the language of any particular culture can have major effects on the viability of that culture, and our own language of logic, Loglan, may fill the bill. Best of luck, folks!
Who knows, maybe the CONTACT conference of 1989 in Phoenix, Arizona, may eventually be shown to be a remarkable forecast. This is where the students running the “Mars colonization” scenario elected to have the official language of (their) Mars be Loglan...could happen, couldn’t it!
Those of you who are using The Institute software to learn/practice should remember to copy the statistics and send them to The Institute periodically. Without these statistics the scientific side of this experiment will fail for lack of concrete data points.
Well, that is about it for this time. Keep those cards and letters and electrons coming! This is your journal (as you can see by Lo Lerci) and the topics of discussion are those you propose.
Sia. I loa.
Hue Djim