[lojban-beginners] Re: "I gotta go feed my baby turtles"

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Wednesday 29 October 2008 12:37:05 tijlan wrote:
> from
> http://publius-ovidius.livejournal.com/288241.html
>
> "There is an artificial language called Lojban which is based on
> predicate logic. It was created to form a language in which it is
> impossible to form an ambiguous sentence. That's a bit of a shame as
> it would eliminate so much humor."
>
> Do we have any workaround to retain as much humor in Lojban as in
> English in terms of ambiguity?

A Lojban sentence is *syntactically* unambiguous, but there are other kinds of 
ambiguity:
*Tanru are ambiguous. "fraso ctuca", just like "French teacher", can mean "a 
teacher who is French" or "someone who teaches French".
*"ra" and "ru" refer to some sumti before the one that "ri" would refer to, 
but unless there are no more than three non-pronoun sumti before it, which 
one isn't exactly specified.
*A letter used as a pronoun refers to something that begins with that letter. 
If there's more than one, it's ambiguous.

There are other kinds of humor too. Consider this:
lu li'o ka'u le nu le terdi cu carna le jendu cu cacra li revo li'u
.i lu lo'e nu catra zo'u sei la noltroni'u cu cusku ko vimcu le stedu ti li'u

mu'omi'e pier.