Message-Id: <199811201048.MAA26966@firat.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr>
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 12:46:49 +0200 (EET)
From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
To: lojban@onelist.com
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Subject: [lojban] More proverbs, and a digression on badness
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From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>


A cynical one here:

   ko xamgu seria lenu se xlali

(I'm assuming here that it is permissable to elide "do"
as the (transposed) first place of "lenu se xlali")

A more literal translation is:

   ko xamgu .i ko se xlali

or even

   ko ge xamgu gi se xlali

although these both lose the causal connection implicit in the
original.  This is a problem in lojbanising figurative language. 
"ko xamgu .i ko se xlali" sounds nice, and is a closer translation,
but what it means semantically is that I am ordering/requesting you
to be good (for someone) and also to be the recipient of something
bad.  The sense is more like "le prenu poi xamgu cu se xlali" but
that's pretty boring.  Perhaps "pe'a ko ge xamgu gi xlali".

Incidentally, I'm not so sure about the note on "xlali" in the
gi'uste:

xlali [ xla ] bad ; 'mal-' 
x1 is bad for x2 by standard x3; x1 is poor/unacceptable to x2 
[be careful to distinguish between a bad/unacceptable event, 
and a bad/unacceptable agent: x1 does poorly (= lenu ko'a gasnu cu
xlali and not normally ko'a xlali)]; (cf. palci, mabla, xamgu,
betri) 

This seems to carry over into Lojban the natlang fallacy of
distinguishing between "be" and "do".  

   la djan xlali 

means that John is bad for some person by some standard, which is
the same as John doing something which has a bad effect on some
person, which is the same as "le nu la djan. gasnu cu xlali", unless
you mean that the fact that John exists is in and of itself harmful,
or that there is some transcendent metaphysical quality of badness
which John possesses, in which latter case a different word would be
appropriate (probably "palci").  
  

With this next one I'm not sure if the metaphorical use of "barda"
in "barda tavla" (talk big) is permissable:

   ko citka le barda djaspi .i ko na barda tavla

and finally the opposite of "dog eat dog" perhaps!

   le lajgerku na batci le lajgerku


co'o mi'e robin.


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