From: Mitch Tishmack <idylls@...>
Date: 2005-10-23T11:27:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Rubyists into Lojban?

I have dabbled into Lojban a bit. Not anything too serious at the  
moment. I am learning French and German so I have my mind occupied  
enough for now

But I have been building a mini flash-card-like program for my own  
aid in remembering vocabulary, I treat similar words as sets. I have  
been trying to keep it semi-generic.

But to expound on your annotator program. I would rather have  
something similar to this:
http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl

Sure written in perl, and more for kanji to furigana/katakana/ 
hiragana etc...  But the general idea is much more user friendly than  
forcing someone to click on a link to obtain information.

Although I would personally prefer using invisible floating divs that  
are shown when you mouse-over the word. I don't want information  
underneath or over when I am reading. The main reason is it acts as a  
crutch when reading. Use it until you learn it then disregard. I  
loved the advice of my first language teacher, don't translate when  
you are reading. Memorise the words and read/think in the language as  
much as possible.

Something like this is what I think would be the closest to what I  
would build:
http://www.brunildo.org/test/CPop.html

Or similar to Eric Meyer's original pure css pop-ups as documented  
here (without fixed positions however):
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/popups/demo.html

I just need to get ruby embedded into an Objective C program for OS X  
and then the fun begins for me. But documentation for this feat is  
less than stellar and my attempts core dumped... alot. (oops :) )

Anyway, I need to get some sleep. I have to go to work in about 6  
hours and patch stuff.

Mitch

On Oct 22, 2005, at 6:31 PM, Hal Fulton wrote:

> Ryan Leavengood wrote:
>
>> I've had some forays into learning Lojban in the past, as well as a
>> bit of Esperanto. In fact I can recall a few years ago when I used  
>> IRC
>> more, my two channels of choice were either #ruby-lang or #lojban.
>> Unfortunately I never did get too far in learning the language, and
>> have forgotten most of what I did learn ;)
>> But part of my goal was always to try to create a decent
>> human-computer speech interface based on Lojban, which due to its
>> logical and regular nature would probably be easier than using
>> English. This would mostly be for fun, learning and my own personal
>> use (since I doubt the average person would learn a new language just
>> to talk to their computer.)
>> So, anyhow, let me know what you are planning Hal.
>>
>
> Well, I've thought of a few things.
>
> 1. An ri-like utility that works at the command line -- give it a
> Lojban word, get back all info about it
>
> 2. A program (using PDF::Writer) which would hopefully make TeX
> unnecessary in spitting out a nicely formatted dictionary
>
> 3. A program that would make what the Brits used to call a "trot" --
> a text with the hard words translated in small print underneath
> each line. And a page-oriented variant on this.
>
> 4. A nice parser.
>
> 5. A sentence diagrammer?? See my blog.
>
> 6. An annotator. Here's a first pass at it:
>    http://hypermetrics.com/pikmin.html
>
> As for the annotator, I have bugs to fix and features to add. One
> big feature I'd like is the ability to create an entire downloadable
> annotated document (which someone could then host on his own site
> or view offline). It also needs to be updated in where it gets its
> content.
>
> 7. I thought of a text-to-speech thing (not voice recognition), but
> I would do it by cheating -- convert the Lojban to phonetic gibberish
> (e.g. "gismu" -> "geese-moo") and run it thru an ordinary TTS program.
> Trouble is, cheating would sometimes get difficult, and many TTS
> programs don't have certain phonemes like Lojban {x} (unless you
> select a German voice or something).
>
>
> Those are pretty much all my thoughts.
>
>
> Hal
>
>
>