Message-Id: <9203200155.AA23556@relay1.UU.NET>
Date:         Fri, 20 Mar 1992 11:52:09 +1000
Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU!nsn
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!pucc.Princeton.EDU!LOJBAN>
From: cbmvax!uunet!MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU!nsn
Subject:      Third phone game phrase
To: John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>,
        Eric Raymond <eric@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>,
        Eric Tiedemann <est@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>
Status: RO

You all know the story.

The original phrase was:

Hot?! Man, it was so hot, if you cracked an egg on the sidewalk, it'd fry in
ten seconds flat! Honest!

Mark translated this as:

xu pu glare paunai
.i leni glare zo'u lenu karpo'i da'i lo sovda vi lo dzuklaji
cu rinka lenu ra bazi binxo lo se jukpa ba'o lo snidu beli pano sa'e
.i ba'ucu'i

(Was it hot? (This is not a question). For the amount of heat, (something)
open-breaking (suppose) into an egg (pieces) at a walk-street causes that it
(the egg pieces) become a cooked-thing after 10 seconds (exactly!). (Accuracy!))

Mark justified not explicitly flagging exaggeration by saying:
]A little strange, in that the speaker claims not to be exaggerating, but
]then that's the most common form of exaggeration.  It hardly seems likely
]to expect Lojban speakers to be honest with their attitudinals and lose the
]power their hyperbole.  Then again, we can assume that the sentence really
]is true, so that's okay.

The main blunder is with the place structure of porpi: it has x1 breaking
into pieces x2, not agent x1 breaking x2 into pieces x3 (this is {popygau}
or some variant of {popri'a}). I like prenexes too, but I would put {leni
glare} into an explicit BAI place (ki'u...). What I was in fact looking for
is the translation of "so hot that..." suggested by Lojbab in a past JL:
{.i glare seja'e lenu co'eli'o}. Are we sure that, if the breaking of the
egg is hypothetic, that its effect (it's being cooked) is also hypothetical
(ie. not have "If you were to break the egg, it will {ca'a} cook)"? I suppose
so.

One may debate whether Mark's translation was good lojban (personally, I
think it was). In any case, it was excellent English :), as Colin's
translation shows:

WAS IT HOT! The heat - if you cracked an egg on the pavement it would be
cooked in ten seconds, no more, really!

(I don't have any comment to make: this is the first almost-fully successful
message relay in this game).

Sylvia came up with:
.u'e glare .ije da'i lo sovda cu selporpi di'o le dagysfe seri'a seljukpa
snidu ja'e li su'e pa no
((Wonder!) Heat. And (suppose) an egg is broken at the locus of the
road-surface causing (that: {lenu} omitted) (something) is-cooked lasting-
-(some)-seconds result the number at most 10.)

This has me a bit worried. The place of {da'i} in the sentence can be
argued about, but the {seljukpa snidu ja'e} sequence doesn't make much
sense to me. Well it does, but it circuitous. What's happening is:
"it's a being-cooked lasting-n-seconds thing"
which makes sense, sorta, but you're waiting to find out what n is,
and instead of n being the second place (seljukpa snidu li su'epano), it
shows up as a {ja'e} place: "resulting in the number 10".
Now this *could* mean "it's an n-second cook ending up being 10 seconds"
(cf.: it's a ten-second wait) which is fine, but it in fact ends up as "it's an
n-second cook resulting in the number ten." In Lojban, of course, it's easier
to deduce from the second phrase that the first was meant. I would still,
however, regard this use of {ja'e} as anomalous, and dangerously vague.

None the less, the meaning is still retievable, and there has not been any
significant distortion, as in the previous two sentences.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick Nicholas, Melbourne Uni, Australia.  nsn@{munagin.ee|mundil.cs}.mu.oz.au
"Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be this nation's
number one killer"      - Henry Gibson, Kentucky Fried Movie
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