From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sat Oct 20 18:15:53 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:15:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IjPQ1-0000Po-Hu for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:15:53 -0700 Received: from phma.optus.nu ([166.82.175.165] helo=ixazon.dynip.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IjPPz-0000Ph-Lk for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:15:53 -0700 Received: from chausie (unknown [192.168.7.4]) by ixazon.dynip.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 63590CE2C2 for ; Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:15:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: some questions Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:15:42 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5 References: <2204fa080710200633i681486e4l234f44613140eb5e@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200710202115.43422.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-Spam-Score: 0.1 X-Spam-Score-Int: 1 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 5512 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Saturday 20 October 2007 09:57, Matt Arnold wrote: > On 10/20/07, Jared Angell wrote: > > Why is it that it is so difficult to translate texts into Lojban? My > > understanding is that it is... > > Because Lojban is extremely alien. It's grammatical concepts and > structures have never existed in any naturally-occurring language. Actually I think it's rather that Lojban doesn't have much vocabulary. If I wanted to translate an article about cement (the kind that is used to make concrete) into Lojban, I'd have to make up words for "calcium silicate", "alite", and "belite". We have words for "calcium" (bogjinme) and "silicon" (cancmu), but not "-ate". "Alite" and "belite", words I didn't know a few days ago, appear to be named for letters of the alphabet, but I don't know for sure, and I don't know what words to use for them in Lojban. If I wanted to translate the article into Spanish, I'd just have to find out what someone else has already called them. The basic grammar doesn't seem any more alien to me than, say, Cree or Ojibwe. (They are related, so what goes for one probably goes for the other.) Cree, like Lojban, doesn't have adjectives, and Ojibwe has preverbs, prenouns, postverbs, and postnouns, which are apparently run together to make words that combine both verbs and nouns together. (I've seen some Wiktionary entries, but I haven't studied the language.) Lojban, instead of the accusative or ergative alignment that most languages have, has an indefinitely long string of numbered places. That is no stranger to me, both of whose native languages are accusative, than ergative is, and no harder to learn the order of places than to learn the various uses of prepositions in natural languages. Pierre