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I thought I'd try translating something into Xorban to see how far I would get and to find the current limits of Xorban. As the thread title hopefully reveals, this is from The Little Prince, chapter 1. At first I wanted to translate at least a few paragraphs, but I gave up after the first sentence, it's just too early I think. (I used experimental punctiation just to see what it would be like, capitalization and punctiation should of course be optional). la je cmla nltra Nxu'a la'a mslfa'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, le je bnle pxre li je ckti mi je clca rcfa leki pseki vska'ake. Annotations: nx- x1 is the first sentence of paragraph x2 (I'm a big fan of this word, please like it!) cjf- x1 is the current/this sentence The variable "u'a" shall henceforth be defined as being bound by "la cjfa". The old meaning of u'a now seems much less useful than I originally thought, so I would like to change it. If the old meaning does have uses some day, another variable can be assigned to it. I'll be using "u'a" for "la cjfa" from now on. mslf: I'd like to use a CC for this, my suggestion has been "mb-". The point of this is that sometimes one would like to explicitly say "Me", and la'a mslfa'a is quite long. However, since la'a mba'a is still quite long, what I'd like the most is a unary operator that stands for la'a mslfa'a/mba'a and is at most two syllables long: Ca'a. That would make it easier to use "I/me" in a topic-comment sort of way. I left out "once", because I'm not sure how to say it. Maybe rf- x1 happens x2 times would be a good way, maybe not. Probably there will be binary operators for the members of Lojban's ROI selma'o, but I don't know how it will work. Using ps- for pe is very annoying. There should be a different way. I'm not sure if leki pseki works. Questions: 1. Would anybody be opposed to allowing the buffer vowel to have some more allophones? I'm mainly thinking of [I] and [U]. 2. Would it be possible to either give every digit a C-stem that follows the nm- or even better, give every digit its own CC root without any nm-? Right now, seven of them are CC, while three are C. Seems like an annoying randomness. I experimentally used pure CC stems in this text (sk- for six). 3. Is ' really irreversibly [?] now? It makes me a bit sad... Closing Thoughts Xorban is quite different from Lojban! It causes me a headache to construct such sentences, but I expect that to become easier eventually. Some things seem a bit too forethoughty, so some workarounds will probably be necessary to make the language more speakable. Too much thinking-ahead is currently required. Xorban does feel more logical than Lojban, that is, it feels much more strict. You won't get away with sloppy thoughts as much as in Lojban, which is both boon and bane. All that said, I think I'm starting to like Xorban, if it becomes more usable. co q selpahi qa'a