Date: Sun, 11 Sep 94 19:06:33 EDT
From: jorge@phyast.pitt.edu
Message-Id: <9409112306.AA25739@clueless.phyast.pitt.edu>
To: veion@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi
Subject: Re: coi
Content-Length: 2472
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coi doi veion

Some comments on your comments about the poem.

> -----
> Comments:
> 
>   (Setting aside the concrete nature of Lojban and accepting the
>    unmarked figurative usage)

I don't mind the figurative usage, but there are some uses that seem
to be wrong, for example the use of "natfe", which is not what 
"deny" means in the English version.


>   le rozgu ba nundunra      the rose will be an event-of-winter,
>                             the rose will turn winter
> 
>     Took me a while to find an English expression for this. I rather
>     like this - and stating that all rosa music turns into winter...
>     I vacillated here between 'a' and 'all' but finally chose 'all'.
>     The original was missing the {be}.

I'm not sure I like it much. Why {nundunra} instead of simple {dunra}?
Do you see a difference? I have trouble understanding {nundunra} on its
own, let alone saying that roses will be it.
 
>   kamyxunre                 replaced the obviously outdated rafsi {kaz}

I think it has to be {kamxunre}
 
>   lunra xarnu               something moving with the inevitability
>                             of the Moon in its orbit

I liked that one.
 
>   na(bo) natfe              removed the unparseable {bo}

I think where he uses {nabo} he means {naku}. I don't know if this was
a change in the grammar, but he has this in many of the poems. In this
case {naku} and {na} are practically equivalent.

>   na'e mu'i                 replaced the erroneous {na} with {na'e}

I think it should be {mu'inai}.

 
>     The second verse is an example of a sentence where {fi/fe} seem to
>     be almost unavoidable. I might, however, consider
> 
>          caku tecu'u mi ko cusku leiva ...
>         [ko fi mi ca cusku fe leiva...]
> 
>     as an alternative to avoid the mental juggling which distracts
>     the reader from the flow of the poem.

What do you think of {leiva} for "those"? I'm not sure I like using
spatial tenses here. 

>     The structure {cu'u le pu me do ko cusku...} is quite clever and
>     nicely ambiguous. The past you and the imperative you are
>     speaking/ougth to speak simultaneously in a way very difficult
>     to convey satisfactorily in English.

It's nice, but I don't think too ambiguous. The order/request is to say 
the words now, but at the same time, {do} has to be {le pu me do}, i.e. 
"something that was in the past related to {do}", so he/she is asked to 
be his/her old self again. 

Jorge