GENERAL: Daddy Lojbab is Back, More or Less (mostly less)

["(Logical Language Group)" <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

I have returned a week early from Russia, with two wonderful children.  The
adoption went especially quickly, and I was strongly urged to get back to the
US more quickly so that the children would bond with their mother, rather than
every other female that assisted me in helping take care of them the last
week (which they seemed to be starting to do).

All my work on Russian was not nearly enough, and I will have to continue
studying for quite a while in order to be able to truly speak the language.
My kids will probably speak English fluently long before I speak Russian
communicatively on other than the most basic topics; perhaps they will speak
Lojban fluently before then as well %^)

Lojban got a bit of a boost from my trip:
Ivan's trabslation of the Lojban brochure will be published in a "Transactions"
journal in Russia, I think the "Trabsactions of the Society of Eastern and
Oriental Languages" or something like that - I'll post good biblio info when
I have it available.  This will be the FIRST academic publication about the
Loglan project other than book reviews, which don;t really count (I doubt that
many scholars consider Scientific American sufficently schoalrly to have it
count in Loglan's favor, and having scholarly publications is important in
seeking grants, etc.)

On Friday I presented a 'seminar' on Lojban (basically a short talk with
question-answering) to about 20 people at Moscow State University Dept. of
Philology and Linguistics.  Three professors, Mikhail Maron who arranged the
talk, and the rest primarily grad students who are studying theoretical
linguistics and were also taking a 'practical English' class, whose teacher saw
this as a good opportunity.  But the students seemed genuinely interested,
and the professors as well, most especially the department chairman, Professor
Polikarpov, who I will be having further discussions with via email.  All-in-all
there were many regrets that I could not stay longer in Moscow and arrange f
further discussions, but the purpose of the trip was primarily for the kids,
and they most certainly had to come first in my planning.

I also had discussions with the Academician leading Russia's efforts in
machine translation.  Some interest there, but their problem right now is
financial - they have to find a way to commercialize (i.e. attract Western
money), and there is little likelihood that we are going to be able to help
in that.

I will be keeping a low profile here for at least a few more weeks.  Other
than minimally reading mail, my major Lojban activity will be putting out
JL17 and LK17.  Until those are done, don;t expect to see much of me.  And
given that I will be practicing being a daddy, a very new experience, my Lojban
time will probably be fairly low anyway.  (Long-term, after the kids start
going to school in a month or two, I am hoping that my productivity will be
the same or greater than it has been the last few months.  Some may say that
this is not a very ambitious goal %^)

lojbab