From rwhe@apocalypse.org Sun Aug 22 01:32:00 1999 X-Digest-Num: 217 Message-ID: <44114.217.1168.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 01:32:00 -0700 From: Ron Hale-Evans Subject: Lojban analogies and kennings X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1168 Greetings from a semilurker... A few people on the list know of my artgame Kennexions. If you don't, you can learn more about it here: Lojban is a central part of the game, but I find my Lojban is deficient for some of the things I want to do. That's why I'm delurking; I'm hoping for help with some basic questions. But first some background: A central part of Kennexions is forming "kennings," which are an ancient Norse poetic form based on analogies. Example: E1. psychology : mind :: biology : body E2. Psychology is to the mind as biology is to the body. E3. psychology = mind biology E2 above is a restatement of E1 in ordinary English. E3 shows a kenning ("mind biology") which is a poetic restatement of the word "psychology." You may have noticed that "mind biology" resembles a tanru. Because kennings can easily be expressed by tanru (as can the Aztec poetic form of "difrasismo," but that's another story), and because Lojban is formal enough to be parsed by computer, I have chosen Lojban as the basis for my "game language." Right now, I can generate kennings automatically (with a Perl script) from tabular data such as Aleister Crowley's book _777_, a rich source for analogies in the domain of mythology. I can also manually build geometrical kenning game structures in Fluidiom (formerly Struck) -- see ; it turns out that kenning analogies map prettily onto tetrahedra. Eventually I would like to have a Perl script that can parse Lojban, then spit out a file to be rendered in Fluidiom. As a small step, I've been trying to figure out how to write analogies in Lojban. Assuming that "biology" is "ji'eske" and "psychology" is "menske" (please correct my lujvo), then could the above be rendered thus? L1. menske : menli :: ji'eske : xadni L2. .i ke menske tai menli ke'e tai ke ji'eske tai xadni ke'e L3. .i menske du menli ji'eske I'm pretty sure L3 is ungrammatical; what's wrong with it? And how about L2? (I know that L1 is completely ungrammatical; it's just shorthand.) Thanks in advance for everybody's help. Ron H-E -- Ron Hale-Evans: rwhe@apocalypse.org & http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/ Center for Ludic Synergy & "Kennexions" Glass Bead Game & Hexagram-8 I Ching Mailing List & State-Specific Sciences List & Positive Revolution FAQ