On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Jonathan Jones
<eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own."
It's fairly obvious that "add" is the keyword here- the entire sentence is built from that relationship. In Lojban, "add" is {jmina} "x1 combines x2 with x3...". Similarly, the "will" is just {ba}. The hard part in this is "biological and technological". We have {mivyske} "x1 is biology based on methodology x2" and {zbaske} "x1 is the technology of product x2...". The definition of both "biological" and "technological" is "pertaining to [biology/technology]", so we want to add {srana} "x1 pertains to x2" to them to get our desired words, so we have {mivyskera'a} "x1 pertains to biology" and {zbaskera'a} "x1 pertains to technology".
Next, we have to say "distinctiveness". After some thought, I determined that the best way would be to use {po} "specific to". This is mainly because it reduces the amount we have to say. We also probably want to use {po'o] "...uniquely", which asserts that the relationship is unique to the sumti it is attached to. So, now we just have to put it all together:
"distinctiveness" is steci, what it is that makes X special. And there is really no need for the -ra'a endings. That's the nice thing about selbri. They function equally well as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs simply by their use in the sentence.
And given that I've already defined "mi" to be an implicit plural with my foregoing "mi'e", we can use mi rather than mi'a. so:
"mi ba jmina lo mivyske jo'u zbaske steci po do ri po mi"
--gejyspa
{mi'a ba jmina lo mivyskera'a je zbaskera'a po do po'o ri po mi'a}
Now we have the first three sentences:
"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own."
{mi'a selcme zo.borg. .i ko sisti lonu nensabji lo nencalku kei gi'e radydu'a lo do keslo'i .i mi'a ba jmina lo mivyskera'a je zbaskera'a po do po'o ri po mi'a}
We have two more left, which I'll do in the next email.