X-Digest-Num: 146
Message-ID: <44114.146.859.959273824@eGroups.com>
Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 01:08:00 -0300
From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?Jorge_J._Llamb=EDas?=" <jorge@intermedia.com.ar>
Subject: Re: xa'unro'a xibi
X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 859
Content-Length: 7063
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I hope everybody is reading these texts that Michael is
sending because they're excelent Lojban material.
His usage is very Lojbanic in the sense that it is not 
just a calque of English expressions. Here I make some 
comments about the last one, mainly about minor 
grammar points, but also some on usage.

>cerni le da'amoi pele mubyspe le da'amoi pele dormidju
>(Eleven o'clock in the morning; day before the wedding.)

I can't find mub- in the rafsi list, but I assume {mubyspe}
must be {mu'e speni}. But shouldn't it be {le da'amoi
pe le purci be le mubyspe}? The one-before-last  _before_
the marriage, otherwise, if it's the one-before-last
of the marriage, it would be the day before the divorce! 

{mubyspe}, or simply {nunspe} is the whole marriage, 
not just the wedding. {nunspebi'o}, or {nunco'aspe}
would be the wedding.

{le da'amoi pe le dormidju} is even more troublesome
because here you have to guess that you're talking about
hours. The x3 of cerni is really for spatial location, but 
since I think it doesn't make much sense to have a defined 
place for that I don't mind using it for time location as well.
But how can you tell it's the penultimate hour (before) 
noon and not the penultimate minute, or even the 
penultimate cup of coffee you had before noon?
Maybe it works, I guess hours is the most likely 
interpretation.


>.i co'a nu fonxa (The phone rings.) .i co'e fa ko'a goi
>lemi bavyspe (Djuna gets it.) 

{co'a nu fonxa} is very metaphorical. After all, the event
of something being a telephone had already started
before it rang, even if nobody was paying attention,
but it's a nice metaphor, as if the phone comes to 
existence when it starts to ring.

But I doubt I would have gotten the second one without 
the help of the translation. The {fa} is funny, because
{co'e} could be anything, so you could use it to stand 
for the {se broda} of whatever {broda} you had in mind 
and not used {fa}. It suggests an agent, since many 
selbri have agents in the x1, but {gau} would have
been better for that. Why not {ko'a spuda}?

If I hadn't had the translation, I would have probably
guessed "it was my fiancee (on the phone)", rather
than "my fiancee gets it".

>.i ze'i sanli co to'e
>sezmu'u (She stands frozen for a moment)

{muvdu} is non-agentive, but I know that in some old
gismu lists it still appears as agentive. So it should
be just {muvdu} instead of {sezmu'u}.

I was always unhappy with {to'e muvdu} for immobile
because that is not the opposite of "x1 moves to x2 
from x3 via x4". It is the opposite of "x1 moves/is not still".
In some sense {to'e desku} would be much better,
even though in terms of the English keywords it 
doesn't sound so good.   

> .icabo flira
>co frumu joi nu se cfipu (with a look of frowning
>bewilderment.) 

I don't like {frumu joi nu se cfipu} because you are mixing
a person with an event of someone being confused.
Why not just {frumu joi se cfipu}? Or else {nunfrumu joi 
nu se cfipu}, or {nu frumu joi se cfipu}.

>.ibabo fonxa ganlo (Hangs the phone up.)
>.i masno bacru ledu'utu'e diklo vecnu bo pulji (Slowly
>says that that was the State Comptroller.)

You can't use {tu'e} inside a du'u (or any NU clause),
that's just not grammatical. Whether you can sensibly
use a du'u as the x2 of bacru is for a much longer 
discussion. 

> .i .uecai ba'o
>dicra le barja co ca'onu jukpa je vecnu kei ku pe le ko'e
>goi ko'a .e mi ge'u banli sakta joi nanba (They'd shut
>down the bakery that was making our wedding cake!)

{ca'o} is not grammatical in that position. Tenses can 
only tag the whole selbri, not only some part of the tanru.
But you could say {le bajra co nu ca'o jukpa je vecnu} 
instead. {kei ku} is not wrong, but unnecessary.

>.ini'ibo ko'e fu'icu'i nu'o cpacu ko'i goi le saktynanba
>ti'u fu'epo'o li pa bi'i li pa pimu fu'u (Which meant that
>we would have to pick it up ourselves, between one &
>one-thirty only.) 

{iseni'ibo} marks the entailed event.  

>.i nitcu ko'o goi le lenku brakarce
>ge'u lenu muvdu ko'i fo le barja fi rixini'upa (We
>needed an airconditioned truck to move it to a new place.)

{muvgau} instead of {muvdu}. 
{rixini'upa} is very creative.
 
>.i nitcu le cnino poi muvdu fi ke'a tu'u (And a new place
>to move it to...) .i .iicai (Yikes!)

I guess this {tu'u} means that all this was being said
by ko'a, but it's not grammatical like that. Besides, you
used the word ko'a in the middle, which ko'a would
not have used, so you can't have been quoting her.
It works just as well if it's the narrator telling all those
things.

>.i ba tu'a so'o fonxa kuku ko'e sutra klama (After several
>calls we rushed out.) 

{so'o fonxa} are several phones, I'm not sure what kind
of abstraction is {tu'a} hiding here. Also, you can only have 
one {ku} there, but you don't need even one. If you want to
put in all the terminators it's {ba tu'a so'oboi fonxa ku lu'u
ko'e sutra klama vau}, but I don't recommed it.

>.i mi'a klama le jaivi tu'a ko'o fu
>ko'u goi leko'a karce (We went to the truck place in
>Djuna's car.) 

You could have used {mi'a goi ko'a joi mi} from the start
to avoid having to use {ko'e}. I see that you are almost 
running out of pronouns already! 

{le jaivi tu'a ko'o} doesn't work. {jaivi} is like {se}, it can only
be used in front of a brivla, not a sumti. You could say
{le jaivi me ko'o}, or just {le ko'o stuzi} for the truck place.

>.ibabo nu'i mi fo ko'o nu'u ko'a fo ko'u
>klama fe le jaivi ko'i (Then i drove the truck, with Djuna
>following, to the bakery.) 

oi termsets! I don't like them. It should be either
{nu'i ge mi fu ko'o [nu'u] gi ko'a fu ko'u [nu'u] klama
fe le jaivi me ko'i}, where both {nu'u}s are elidable or  
{mi ce'e fu ko'o pe'e je ko'a ce'e fu ko'u klama li'o}
in afterthought mode.  

>.i carmi masno karcygri (The
>traffic crawled.) .i  ca'obo .o'unai mi zgana lenuke le
>junla cu kancu le tcika (I watched the clock count the
>time all the while (stress!).) 

{ke} is not grammatical there. I would have used
{lei tcika} and others {le'i tcika} instead of {le tcika}.

>.i co'u klama sekai lekake
>leni mlecu le fanmo fo ce'u kei cu muntu li vo ke'e (We got
>there with four minutes to spare.) 

ke-ke'e is not grammatical there either. 

And there has to be a simpler way of saying that!
For example: {i co'u klama pu le fanmo zi lo mentu be li vo}

>.i ko'a ko'i slabu
>cuxyviska va'o le sorcu (Djuna recognized our cake in the
>back.).i ko'i cimei pagbu (It was in three parts) 

I think it should be either {ko'i pagbu cimei} or
{ko'i cimei se pagbu}. It is not a threesome-part but
a threesome of parts or a threesome-whole.

>gi'e
>ba'o sakta matne dasni (& already iced.) .i .i'unai na'e
>drani leka cmene (The name on it was wrong (what!).)
>.iseni'inaibo .uocai ko'e ko'i lebna (We took it anyway
>(eureka!).) .i leko'a mensi co'u zbasu (Djuna's sister
>finished it for us.) 

Maybe {mo'u zbasu} is more accurate here.

>.i ta'onai le mubyspe cu snada co
>banli (And the wedding was a great success.)

i a'o le nunspe ze'u snada co banli

co'o mi'e xorxes