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Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Trying my first translation ... a few questions.
la .xabyltos. cu cusku di'e
Thank you again. I'm really beginning to think that this will be much
more rewarding than just copying some of the shorter texts and sorting
through it. This will really make me think about what I want to say and
how I need to say it.
From experience I know that few things will expose one's gaps quicker
than trying to translate something challenging into Lojban. I strongly
recommend it.
My next question is simple, I believe, and touches upon something said
previously.
He has lost his ball.
.i ko'a pu cirko lo ko'a bolci
or
.i ko'a pu cirko lo bolci
While talking about "his bark" yesterday, it was noted that ke'a was not
really needed due to context. Is it the same here? Would I need ko'a
when talking about "his" ball?
Well, with the {ko'a} it means "his ball", and without it it means
"ball". You can leave it out when it's obvious, but it may often not be.
But maybe your questions arises from the whole {cirko} issue, where in
my translation the {ke'a} disappeared due to {cirko lo ka gercmo}. I'll
talk about this more below.
Another question deals with a ... I guess you would call it a split
quote (and actually the same question from above).
"Little Puppy," said Bird. "You have lost your ball."
.i lu doi la cmalu cityge'u li'u se cusku la cipni .i lu do pu cirko lo
do bolci li'u
Is this proper? Do I have to mark Bird as saying the second sentence,
or is that understood from context? If it does need marked, to I do it
at the beginning or the end of the sentence, or would that be a matter
of preference?
It is proper. It's also totally fine to have something after {.i} that
isn't a complete sentence, like a sumti for instance. Context takes care
of who said it, just like in English.
Another very common method of doing split quotes that is used in large
works such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz is to use {sei}
like so:
.i «lu doi la cmalu cityge'u —sei la cipni cu cusku— do pu cirko lo do
bolci li'u»
(The em dashes are used to make the inserted material more readily
discernible. This is optional.)
With this method the whole quote remains in one piece.
One last question from la selpa'i post. He used the word zvajuko, (
... te'a zvajuko lo keldai ) but I not quite sure what it means. I know
that zva is a rafsi form of zvati, but I haven't been able to figure out
quite what juko would refer to.
It's the zi'evla version of {zvajuncri}. See
http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/dict/addvalsi.html?valsi=zvajuko
As mentioned earlier, I understand {cirko}'s x2 to always be a property
abstraction, and saying {cirko lo keldai} is either non-sense or
implicit sumti-raising (or sloppy speech). In Lojban, losing a toy is
not the same thing as losing one's patience. English conflates these
different senses of "lose" into a single word, but Lojban tries to avoid
such conflations. Using {cirko} for both senses (and all the other
senses of "lose") would only import the polysemy of English into Lojban.
Therefore I use {zvajuko} (a contraction from "ZVAti dJUno cirKO") for
the sense of "losing the property of knowing where something is".
mi'e la selpa'i mu'o
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