From - Mon Feb 26 10:37:10 1996 Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id IAA23086 for ; Sun, 25 Feb 1996 08:51:51 -0500 Message-Id: <199602251351.IAA23086@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 655BE9BF ; Sun, 25 Feb 1996 8:11:57 -0500 Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 18:26:20 -0700 Reply-To: Chris Bogart Sender: Lojban list From: Chris Bogart Subject: xelfanva and comments X-To: lojban@cuvmb.bitnet To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 3221 [Comments in English follow, then English translation] lenu no lei so'i bangu cu xe tanru fu lu<< vijytcana melbi >>li'u kei na spaji .i lei vijytcana cu tolmelbi .i so'i ko'a mutce leka tolmelbi .i tu'a le ni so'o ko'a tolmelbi kei se nibli lo pu nuncamtoi rirci .i le kamtolmelbi cu se rinka fi ledu'u le vijytcana cu vasru lei fengu joi tatpi joi facki be lonu le bakfu pu klama la tcidrmurmansk. to ro se djuno nafmupli be le la'eno'a munje javni cu pamei me la vijytcanrmurmansk. toi .i le di'upla cu troci co jarco la'edi'u sepi'o le dy. selpla .i dy. troci co basna le kamtatpi joi kamfengu morna lo vlile sfetai .e lo xankygau skari gi'e frilygau lenu ze'eba sepli fa le litru le ly. bakfu ja se prami kei .e lenu cfipu le litru leka da simlu farsni fi lei canko .a lei darno ke dadne'ota'u sorcu .a le cabra se zvati be la tarcrursamainor bei vi le nicte tsani .i va'o lenu cumki kei troci co jarco le djacu tubnu ki'u lenu se pilno gi'e troci co mipri le li'avro ki'u ja'o na se pilno - la dyglys. edymz. "le ruxse'i ke clani manku tcatyselytcika" ------------- Comments: This is a short xelfanva I started a long time ago and I wasn't able to complete it at the time. I'm glad to find my lojban has improved some over the last year or so. In the middle paragraph is a sentence which uses "only" -- I tried to translate it without {po'o}, va'o being inspired by recent discussions on the topic. What comes out here sounds weird and unnatural to me, but it strikes me as something that could easily be memorized as an idiomatic phrase meaning "only" -- and given that it's arguably more logical than {po'o}, I think I'm going to ze'eba try to minimize my use of {po'o}. I prefer writing original stuff to translating from English, and I think the awkwardness of the second paragraph amply demonstrates why. Adams is IMO a genius with complicated English sentences, and I think Lojban still lacks a standard of elegant complexity. ------- The selfanva, without permission: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not. - Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"