From eks2@york.ac.uk Tue Jul 01 00:49:37 2003 Return-Path: X-Sender: eks2@york.ac.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 78185 invoked from network); 1 Jul 2003 07:49:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.217) by m15.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 1 Jul 2003 07:49:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO n15.grp.scd.yahoo.com) (66.218.66.70) by mta2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 1 Jul 2003 07:49:36 -0000 Received: from [66.218.67.253] by n15.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 01 Jul 2003 07:49:36 -0000 Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 07:49:33 -0000 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: dog biscuits Message-ID: User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Length: 690 X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster From: "Evgeni Sklyanin" X-Originating-IP: 144.32.128.75 X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=71790832 X-Yahoo-Profile: sklyanin X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 20270 A sketch I saw on British TV (Channel 3) a few days ago. A customer enters a pet shop and asks for "dog biscuits". >From the subsequent dialogue it becomes clear that she thinks that "dog biscuits" are made of dog meat. The astonished shop clerk tries to explain her that it is actually food for dogs. However, she is adamant and quotes as counterexamples "prawn crackers" and "chicken nuggets". In the end, she buys "bird seeds" and asks how long does it take to grow birds from them. It occured to me that the play of words is perfectly translatable into Lojban (if I only remembered the whole text!) and is a good illustration to the ambiguity of tanru. mi'e .evgenis.