From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Tue Apr 7 09:38:21 1992 Return-Path: Date: Tue Apr 7 09:38:21 1992 Message-Id: <9204071245.AA01038@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: Ivan A Derzhanski Sender: Lojban list From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: punchlines To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster's message of Thu, 2 Apr 1992 20:33:35 LCL <21874.9204030131@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Status: RO > Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1992 20:33:35 LCL > From: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster > > I must apologise for that (I like apologising for things beeyond my control > <...>) You ought to say {.u'use'inai}. > ru'azo'o loire jvixi'a casnu vi lo xalgusta This sentence no bridi. 'Tis {cu casnu} or {ca'o casnu}. > lo cizra pe mi pu fasnu {lo cizra mi pu fasnu} should suffice. > .iva'i mi bajryjvi fo le zemoi bele'inu xirma bajryjvi The ve jivna should be the prize, not the competition. Or? > .i mi zemoi le'i jivna leka sinxa selme'e Is this the alphabetical order of names, or what? > .i le remoi cu bacru lu cizra caicai I've always thought nine grades of uification were more than enough. {caicai} is perhaps unnecessary. > .i le mintu cu fansu mi <...> > .imu'ibo le mintu cu fansu mi {fasnu} on both occasions. > .i lere xirma cu simxu catlu seci'o leka manci .ibazibo le xirma cu bacru lu > .uecaicai.u'e le gerku pu'i tavla li'u > > Now if the joke was being told in Korean, the greyhound would add: > > lu .ua mi jimpe .i do cfipu ki'u lenu mi noi gerku cu tavla .i lenu go'i cu > xajmi ki'u lenu do noi xirma cupa'a naka'e da'inai tavla li'u > > In my culture, this is how you kill a joke. I reckon it is my turn to confess that I have no clue as to where to look for the punchline, with or without the Korean supplement. Help! :-) > And because the delivery of jokes <...> is so > culture-dependent, jokes in Lojban will prove problematic. Yes, it seems my failure with this one proves that. > By the way, as you'll find if you download the lastest ma'oste off the PLS, > we killed {du'a} the BAI ages ago (it used to mean {fi'o dunda}). I use the valste as of 15/8/90. My system greets me every day with a hostile message about how many hundred Kbytes (and within how many days) I am to remove from my account, so I can't dream of downloading anything from anywhere. I used to be on the Gaelic list; I left it because I had no room to store the stuff from it. > The feeling > was that this was prepositionese, and it was more appropriate for Lojban > (not a prepositional language, at least not according to Nora) to express > the "dative" of tedu'a as a separate bridi. It is as prepositional as a language can be. > (Though you could argue the use of {seci'o} above is just about as > prepositionish). Yes, that's where I come in with things like {... cusku beleka manci be'o ke simxu catlu}. But to my ear {terve'u dunda} is a bad way of saying `buy * for *'. Ivan