From robin@bilkent.edu.tr Mon Apr 28 09:21:44 2003 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Mon, 28 Apr 2003 09:21:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr ([139.179.30.24]) by digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.12) id 19ABNo-0007kJ-00 for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Mon, 28 Apr 2003 09:21:40 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 540D832034 for ; Mon, 28 Apr 2003 19:21:03 +0300 (EEST) Received: from bilkent.edu.tr (ppp111.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr [139.179.111.111]) by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5198932002 for ; Mon, 28 Apr 2003 19:21:01 +0300 (EEST) Message-ID: <3EADB850.7010200@bilkent.edu.tr> Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 19:25:04 -0400 From: "robin.bcc" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030313 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Spiritual texts? References: <200304290351.51565.sam@vilain.net> In-Reply-To: <200304290351.51565.sam@vilain.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS snapshot-20020531 X-archive-position: 265 X-Approved-By: robin@bilkent.edu.tr 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: robin@bilkent.edu.tr Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners Sam Vilain wrote: > I see the effort at > http://www.digitalkingdom.org/cvsweb/lojban/translations/drbible/ > > to translate the Bible. Good luck. I'll see you at the next apocalypse > :-). > > Winning over several hundred million english speaking christians might be > worth the years it would take to translate the bible to lojban, but a more > `profitable' endeavour might be to translate the 81 `chapters' (more like > short poems) of the Tao Te Ching to win over a billion Chinese. After > all, if it is a truly graceful language, then it should be able to > describe the way of all things gracefully too. > > A free (GPLed) English translation of the Tao Te Ching is at: > > http://www.chinapage.com/gnl.html > > There are some challenging terms to translate; perhaps someone has already > had some thoughts on these: > > yin - translates to any yin concept; empty, without, soft, female, black > yang - full, with, hard, male, white > tao - often translated as (the) `way' (tadji ? Plain dadjo?) > pu'u - the block of uncarved wood (c.f. Child-like mind) > ch'i - life force > > Chinese certainly has some interesting huffman coding in their language. > > Here is chapter 1: > > The Way (Tao) that can be experienced is not (the) true (Tao); > The world that can be constructed is not true. > The Way (Tao) manifests all that happens and may happen (to infinity); > The world represents all that exists and may exist. > > To experience without intention is to sense the world; > To experience with intention is to anticipate the world. > These two experiences are indistinguishable; > Their construction differs but their effect is the same. > > Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way (Tao), > Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world. > > > I don't know if anyone's heard of Perl golf. In Standard golf, you play a > game with a stick knocking a little white ball around in as few strokes as > possible. Of course, we all know that. In Perl golf, you play to write a > program that performs a functional description in as few keystrokes as > possible. > > So, in lojban golf - you try to express as much of the message as > semantically possible, in as few words as possible, using as few > grammatical constructs as possible. > > Fore! Some people were discussing a Tao Te Ching translation a few years back. I don't know if the translation got anywhere, though. The problem is that there aren't many (if any) Lojbanists who are expert in Classical Chinese. Translating it as though it were modern Chinese is not a good idea; Classical Chinese is just about understandable if you speak modern Chinese, but it can lead you up the garden path. It would be like trying to translate Chaucer without any knowledge of Middle English. I like the principle of Lojban golf, though. robin.tr -- "A Perl script is "correct" if it gets the job done before your boss fires you." - Larry Wall Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin