Rubyists into Lojban?

[rubyhacker]

I don't wish to wander OT, but as I have been tinkering
with some Ruby tools for Lojban, it's on-topic.

If you've never heard of it: http://www.lojban.org

Who else here might be interested?

And Chad -- who was the guy sitting across from you
at that table? The one who said he once wrote a
Lojban parser? My memory fails me.


Hal

 

[Trans]

Hi Hal

I am quite familiar with Lojban (though not a practicing user) I
originally studied Loglan in 1988. ConLang is a hobby of mine (although
not as much since about two years ago when I finally finshied the basis
of my own --two decades in the making!).

What kind of tools? Are you translating their grammer validator into
Ruby?

T.

 

[Christophe Grandsire]

En r=E9ponse =E0 (e-mail address removed) :

I don't wish to wander OT, but as I have been tinkering
with some Ruby tools for Lojban, it's on-topic.
=20
Hehe.

If you've never heard of it: http://www.lojban.org
=20
Who else here might be interested?
=20

Not specifically in Lojban itself, but (as you may guess from my=20
signature ) in conlangs in general. My dream is to make a port of=20
Kura (http://www.ats.lmu.de/kura/index.php), written originally by a=20
fellow conlanger, Boudewijn Rempt, from Python to Ruby. But I haven't=20
had the time to begin yet...

I have quite an interest in natural language parsers, but I've not seen=20
many of them in Ruby, and the ones I've seen are restricted to one=20
language...
--=20
Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

 

[Sean O'Halpin]

ConLang is a hobby of mine

Now why doesn't that surprise me?

Regards,
Sean

 

[Chad Fowler]

I don't wish to wander OT, but as I have been tinkering
with some Ruby tools for Lojban, it's on-topic.

If you've never heard of it: http://www.lojban.org

Who else here might be interested?

And Chad -- who was the guy sitting across from you
at that table? The one who said he once wrote a
Lojban parser? My memory fails me.

Hi Hal. I think it was Bruce Williams (http://codefluency.com).


--
Chad Fowler
http://chadfowler.com
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)

 

[Ryan Leavengood]

I don't wish to wander OT, but as I have been tinkering
with some Ruby tools for Lojban, it's on-topic.

If you've never heard of it: http://www.lojban.org

Who else here might be interested?

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.

Ryan

 

[Hal Fulton]

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

 

[Ryan Leavengood]

Those are pretty much all my thoughts.

Very cool. All that sounds very useful for those trying to learn
Lojban. I don't know much about text-to-speech these days, but
logically it seems it couldn't be very hard to create a TTS system for
Lojban by piecing together phonemes from other languages. Though your
"gibberish" technique sounds interesting as well, hehe.

BTW, are there are good Lojban links you would recommend (besides what
Google might show?)

Ryan

 

[Mitch Tishmack]

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

 

[Pit Capitain]

Very cool. All that sounds very useful for those trying to learn
Lojban. I don't know much about text-to-speech these days, but
logically it seems it couldn't be very hard to create a TTS system for
Lojban by piecing together phonemes from other languages. Though your
"gibberish" technique sounds interesting as well, hehe.

BTW, are there are good Lojban links you would recommend (besides what
Google might show?)

I'm interested in this too.

Regards,
Pit

 

[Hal Fulton]

I'm interested in this too.

Well, as far as I know, every Lojban link in the 'verse is reachable
from www.lojban.org in no more than two hops.

So I have stumbled across some interesting stuff, but you could find it
just as fast as I could re-find it.

FWIW, I have a Lojban section in my CafePress store:
http://cafepress.com/mathomhouse/



Cheers,
Hal

 

[jm]

Some other links,

Lojban radio - jbocradi
A podcast about all things lojban (two episodes so far)
http://nemorathwald.com/jbocradi/jbocradi.html

An article on loglan and lojban
http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan

Dictionary
http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/

The Lojban Reference Grammar
http://www.lojban.org/static/publications/reference_grammar.html

and possibly of interest to any one doing text to speech

Talking in Loglan (NB LOGLAN NOT LOJBAN, but should give people some
ideas)
http://www.loglan.org/Logcue/logcue.html


Jeff.

[interesting list snipped]

Those are pretty much all my thoughts.



Very cool. All that sounds very useful for those trying to learn
Lojban. I don't know much about text-to-speech these days, but
logically it seems it couldn't be very hard to create a TTS system
for
Lojban by piecing together phonemes from other languages. Though your
"gibberish" technique sounds interesting as well, hehe.

BTW, are there are good Lojban links you would recommend (besides
what
Google might show?)

I'm interested in this too.

Well, as far as I know, every Lojban link in the 'verse is reachable
from www.lojban.org in no more than two hops.

So I have stumbled across some interesting stuff, but you could find it
just as fast as I could re-find it.

FWIW, I have a Lojban section in my CafePress store:
http://cafepress.com/mathomhouse/



Cheers,
Hal

 

[Pit Capitain]

Some other links,

Lojban radio - jbocradi
A podcast about all things lojban (two episodes so far)
http://nemorathwald.com/jbocradi/jbocradi.html

An article on loglan and lojban
http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan

Dictionary
http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/

The Lojban Reference Grammar
http://www.lojban.org/static/publications/reference_grammar.html

and possibly of interest to any one doing text to speech

Talking in Loglan (NB LOGLAN NOT LOJBAN, but should give people some
ideas)
http://www.loglan.org/Logcue/logcue.html

Jeff, thanks for the links. Some of them were new to me.

Regards,
Pit

 

[Kev Jackson]

Could there be a ruby-quiz with this in the future.......

Kev