From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Sep 11 11:52:15 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 11 Sep 2005 12:04:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1EEWw2-0003oj-Qa for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 11 Sep 2005 11:52:14 -0700 Received: from rwcrmhc14.comcast.net ([216.148.227.89] helo=rwcrmhc12.comcast.net) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1EEWvv-0003ob-Hi for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Sun, 11 Sep 2005 11:52:14 -0700 Received: from [192.168.1.100] (c-67-160-188-198.hsd1.or.comcast.net[67.160.188.198]) by comcast.net (rwcrmhc14) with ESMTP id <2005091118520401400f94kae>; Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:52:05 +0000 From: Scott To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Questions (literally) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 11:52:02 -0700 User-Agent: KMail/1.7.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200509111152.03643.scottr@synthiotics.com> X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 2044 X-Approved-By: jkominek@miranda.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: scottr@synthiotics.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners Alright, I thought it might be fun to come up with a short list of lojban questions to potentially be used as an introductory exercise for newbies (definitely such as myself). It turns out, of course, that just coming up with the questions was an exercise in its own. Forget the answers. Newbie that I am, I am sure that I butchered the grammar as I was hunting through my various lojban sources. So, I'd like to present the questions themselves, not so much to be answered as just to have someone take a look at them and see if they are properly constructed. I did run into one question that I was unable to translate at all, and one or two that I had to resort to homegrown tanru for. Some I definitely have my doubts about, both as to grammar and word choice. So, here they are: 1) What is your name? .i ma cmene do 2) Where do you live? .i do xabju ma 3) What do you do for a living? .i do gunka ma 4) Do you have any pets? .i xu do ponse le satre danlu There is no word for "pet" in my lojban dictionary (the one I generated at jbovlaste), so I had to make this one up. Turning it into lujvo is more than I want to bite off at the moment, so I stuck with tanru. 5) Are you married? .i xu do speni 6) Do you have any children? i. xu do ponse le verba I'm not sure about this one. For some reason that I can't quite put my finger on (probably relating to "ponse"), something in this sentence doesn't feel right to me. But it's the best I can do at the moment. 7) What hobbies do you have? This one completely stumped me. My dictionary doesn't contain any word for "hobby". I tried coming up with tanru for "fun activities", but could not find any word for "fun". The best I could come up with was "cinai zu'o", which is, of course, not a tanru at all and I am too unskilled to put the words together properly in a sentence yet. So, this one remains untranslated. 8) What is your favorite food? .i do zanfri ma cidja 9) Ginger or MaryAnn? .i xu do nelci la .djendjr .onai la .meri,an. It's ungrammatical in English, and only readily understandable to an older portion of American males anyway. But I thought I'd throw it in there. At least I attempted to make it grammatical in lojban. 10) What color is your cereal bowl? .i le cerni sanmi palta cu skari ma My dictionary contains no word for cereal or for bowl. So I settled for a "morning meal plate" tanru, which really doesn't convey what I wanted it to (especially since "plate" is entirely the wrong word). Surprisingly, considering the simplicity of the questions, it took me an hour to come up with just those. Please check them over and let me know how well I did just putting them together. If you can think of better translations, definitely let me know what those might be (and, of course, why). mu'o mi'e la skat.