[lojban-beginners] Re: Translate phrase from the Portal song

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

2009/8/20 Dmitry Shintyakov <shintyakov@gmail.com>:
> coi rodo mi'e dmitris .i mi ze'u cnino jbocli
> Hello everybody, I am Dmitry, and I am probably the oldest Lojban beginner here.
>
> I was trying to translate a phrase from the Portal game song: "There's
> no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying till you
> run out of cake".
>
> Here is the result of an almost hour of extensive dictionary search
> and reading the CLL:
>
> na krinu lonu klaku badri le ro selsre
> .i ko tolsti lonu troci ca'o lonu ralte le nabrkeiki
>
> There is what I don't like in this translation:
> - "le ro selsre" is "all mistakes", not "every".

coi dmitris.

"every" (as well as "each") is distributive, which can be expressed
with an outer quantifier "ro": ro le selsre.

> Maybe it would be
> better to say something like "every time you make a mistake", but how?
> - "selsre" or "nulsre", what would be better for the "mistake"?

"nulsre" is from "nutli srera" ("to neutrally err"?).

"lo/le selsre" is the literal translation of "a mistake", but "make a
mistake" can simply be "srera". "every time you make a mistake" can be
"ro roi lo nu do srera".

> - I failed to find an adequate translation for the "cake". Maybe,
> cilmo titla bo nanba (cimtitnanba)? Are there any better translations?

There are many types of cake. The one that firstly comes to my mind is
something of "panje" (sponge) type. I think "cimtitnanba" is fine, but
"titpanje" might also work.

There is an experimental gismu I created with scoreGismu (a Pearl
program) for "cake" sometime ago:
 darta (etymology: èç -> dangao, àààà -> rot, cake -> keik, pastel ->
pastel, ÑÐÑÑ -> tort, ÙØÙØ -> karka)

> Also, is "nabrkeiki" a valid fu'ivla?

A valid Stage 3 fu'ivla, yes.

> - The whole sentence "keep on trying till you run out of cake", as far
> as I understand it correctly, means something like "Do not stop the
> process of trying, until you meet the event of {there is no cake}",
> and my translation is quite different from it.

Maybe "ko troci co'u lo nu vi na [cake]". I might also add ".e'i" for
"just ...".

mu'o mi'e tijlan