[conlang_learners] Congrats

[Jim Henry]

2009/9/9 Puey McCleary <pueymccleary at gmail.com>:

>                 It would be useful to a learner like myself, and perchance
> to some others, if one could read the materials on Kēlen and gjâ-zym-byn
> printed on paper.  Is there a way, with the permission of the authors of

I don't think you'd need our permission just to reformat the website
materials for your own use in order to print them out in a more useful
way than the default layout you get from printing a webpage from your
browser.  And I can't speak for Sylvia, but I hereby give anybody who
wants to permission to reformat the gzb materials on the website as a
PDF or .doc or whatever and then redistribute them, e.g. via the files
area of the gzb Google Group or on FrathWiki, as long as you include
an introductory note saying "This is a snapshot of the gjâ-zym-byn
website as of <date and time>; see <main url> or <mirror url> for the
current version."   When the grammar, lexicon, lessons etc. are in a
more stable condition, I may produce such a PDF myself.


> all of the copious lessons, articles, grammatical schemata, and lexical for
> gzb so that I may print it out?  That way I can read everything and make

Reformatting the phonology, grammar and semantics documents as a PDF
should be fairly straightforward, just a matter of tweaking the
typeface and font sizes and making sure the page breaks are in
sensible places.  The lexicon would be trickier; it's formatted as a
definition list in HTML, which makes it easy on the eye when reading
the webpage (at least I think so -- I'm open to suggestions for better
formatting) but would waste a lot of paper if printed without
significant reformatting.  Probably I should modify the Perl script
that outputs the HTML lexica so that it can also produce a format
that's more suitable for converting into a PDF or otherwise printing.
(The original version of the lexicon is tab-delimited text.)

> notes on paper while I’m in a train or in a tree or in a box or with a fox.

Or in a house or with a mouse, of course.

> Another possibility would be if the authors should grant permission for
> their materials to be used by a site such as Lulu.com so that we could have
> actual books.  That would be splendiferous.

That might be good in the longer term.  In the short term, I think the
website materials for gzb, though not the language itself, are in flux
enough that printing books at the cost Lulu charges would probably be
unwise.  As I think I mentioned before, there are several sections of
the grammar and semantics document that are in process of being
rewritten, and I plan to rewrite the lessons as well.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/