From @uga.cc.uga.edu:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Thu Nov 19 18:40:17 1992 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 19 Nov 1992 13:44:58 -0500 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7704; Thu, 19 Nov 92 13:41:47 EST Received: from UGA.BITNET by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) with BSMTP id 1741; Thu, 19 Nov 92 13:41:47 EST Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 18:40:17 GMT Reply-To: C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Sender: Lojban list From: C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Subject: Re: CAFE.INT: su'u xekri To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: <35q1Gkl7oxF.A.gSE.at0kLB@chain.digitalkingdom.org> Respondeth Nick in his/her godlike supremacy: > > Saith C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK in his/her manifold wisdom: > > >It is late at the bar, and the sky is supremely black, seen from the > >windowed building. (Note 1) > > god-like black in the original; "God" prefixed is an emphatic in Greek > and, I think, Aramaic, but I'm not sure how effective it is in Lojban. > I meant {se canko se nenri} to denote those contained by the building with > the windows, but that's obviously a bit too lazy. "God" prefrixed is emphatic in many forms of English too, but I object to and will wilfully misunderstand it in Lojban. Doesn't work. You mean "nenri", not "se nenri" (as I suspected), but however you do it, the "se canko" modifies the "nenri" not the "se nenri". Hmmm... how about "se ke selca'o selne'i"? I think it works, but it would give me kittens if I came upon it in a text. (.... like a good deal of the present text.... zo'o). > > >Far away, a black chaos of terrible black holes, destroying and creating > >with fearful strength and violence. (Note 2). And right here, the same sort > >of thing going on. > > I was lazy with the place structure of {kalsa} too, mandating that it > be "a chaos of...", which I'd already translated in Colossal Cave as > {kalsysu'a}. The same sort of thing going on in a *social* sense. As I said, I had some problem with UI in your text. So pe'i did you. ROhA (he said, arbitrarily inventing a purely formal subclass of UI, but you know what I mean) are specifically defined as "emotion category/modifier" -ie they modify the speaker's attitude about the utterance, whether that is expressed or not. Consequently what you've said is that you have some feeling on a social scale about the sentence, NOT that it is true in a social kind of way. This is what I meant by my comment about "vusai". I think you're trying to get a sort of back-door tanru modification, and committing a category error. (What's the Lojban for 'flame off'?) > ba'anaita'o is three cmavo. .o'onairu'ero'a srera .i do zu'unai drani Having said which, I'm not sure what it means. I've a feeling I know what you meant by it, viz "unexpectedly, somebody started to sing". Another category error. "ba'a" is about the quality of information in the statement - I suggest that "ba'a" means "Whatever it is I'm claiming is not something I know for a fact, but something I expect to be so", and contrasts with "za'a" and "ka'u" (I think it can co-occur with "ti'e" and "ja'o" however). I'm not sure what kind of negation is "ba'anai" (possibilities are "I'm stating this but I don't actually expect it to be true"; "I assert this with an evidential other than ba'a, such as za'a"; or "I expect that the converse of this is true"). Either way, I don't believe it can convey the attitude that I think you mean here - I would suggest something on the lines of ".ueru'e" or "i'ucu'i". > That's "black" in the bar. > > There's a blackness going on in the bar. I was trying to get over the deliberate vagueness of "su'u". > Hm. Should I publish my own intended translation of the complete piece, > or wait for you all to have done with it? > I'd like to have a go at the other half first. Maybe next week.