Re: [lojban-beginners] Trying my first translation ... a few questions.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 1:59 PM, la .xabltos. <hobbletoe@gmail.com> wrote:

So, I have been studying for a few months now. Most of that time, I read through most of the Wave lessons, and the crash course, though mostly through "Lojban for Beginners". Recently, I started to go through some of the "early reader" texts that I could find, as I think that that will help me learn the basic grammar better as it won't be as complex.

So now I am trying to translate an "early reader" book to Lojban. I have noticed that it really requires you to understand and think about the grammar of the sentence more than I would normally do. I am hoping that this is a learned thing, and that it will be come easier as time passes, as I think it was tripping me up initially.

So, the name of the book is "The Puppy Who Lost his Bark". Initially, I thought that I needed to use "lost" as my selbri, and build the rest of the sentence around that. What I got was

lo cityge'u ma cu cirko le ri gercmo

Which I really knew was not right. "ma" is completely out of place and doesn't fit into the sentence structure. Then it dawned on me that I was dealing with a relative clause, and I think I got it right the second time around.

lo cityge'u poi ma kau cirko le ke'a gercmo

Close, but "ma kau" is neither needed nor correct here. You are thinking about it as trying to translate the "who", but that is already covered by the word "poi". As for "le", I would think most would agree that "lo" would still be better here. And while the "ke'a" is certainly not wrong, most people would tend to leave that out (i.e. "the pupppy who lost a bark/barks" would be understood from context to be most likely the bark associated with him)

I then move on into the book. "Little Puppy likes to play, but loses toys every day."

.i lo cmalu cityge'u goi ko'a cu nelci le nu kelci ku ku'i ri cirko le zilkei ti'u le ro djedi

Since the original has "Little Puppy", a name, I would personally use "la cmalu cityge'u" (or even "la cmaci'oge'u" or "la cmaci'oger")

As for "ti'u le ro djedi" that's not right. "ti'u" is only used for marking a particular time of day (it would take the same kind of sumti as the word it derives from, "tcika"). You could use "ca ro djedi", but I think in this particular case, I would probably tend to be a bitless literal and just "di'i" before cirko.

My question here (outside of hoping that I got it right), is "zilkei". I understand it as a lujvo (zi'o kelci). What I don't understand is why that would be chosen over something like selkei (se kelci). Can anyone explain this choice?

Don't take everything you read in jbovlaste as gospel. Like wikipedia, it is modifiable by pretty much any one. I would definitely use "selkei" for toy. "zilkei" would be a toy in the absolute, that has no particular player of it. But in this case, since Puppy IS playing with them, "selkei" would be better.

Hope this helps,

--gejyspa

I've gone a bit farther, but don't want to run into any copyright blah, blah, blah, so I'll stop here.

Any notes, comments, corrections would be appreciated.

Thank you.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lojban Beginners" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban-beginners+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban-beginners@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban-beginners.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.