[lojban-beginners] Spiritual texts?

[Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>]

I see the effort at 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/cvsweb/lojban/translations/drbible/

to translate the Bible.  Good luck.  I'll see you at the next apocalypse 
:-).

Winning over several hundred million english speaking christians might be 
worth the years it would take to translate the bible to lojban, but a more 
`profitable' endeavour might be to translate the 81 `chapters' (more like 
short poems) of the Tao Te Ching to win over a billion Chinese.  After 
all, if it is a truly graceful language, then it should be able to 
describe the way of all things gracefully too.

A free (GPLed) English translation of the Tao Te Ching is at:

  http://www.chinapage.com/gnl.html

There are some challenging terms to translate; perhaps someone has already 
had some thoughts on these:

  yin - translates to any yin concept; empty, without, soft, female, black
  yang - full, with, hard, male, white
  tao - often translated as (the) `way' (tadji ?  Plain dadjo?)
  pu'u - the block of uncarved wood (c.f. Child-like mind)
  ch'i - life force

Chinese certainly has some interesting huffman coding in their language.

Here is chapter 1:

The Way (Tao) that can be experienced is not (the) true (Tao);
The world that can be constructed is not true.
The Way (Tao) manifests all that happens and may happen (to infinity);
The world represents all that exists and may exist.

To experience without intention is to sense the world;
To experience with intention is to anticipate the world.
These two experiences are indistinguishable;
Their construction differs but their effect is the same.

Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way (Tao),
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world.


I don't know if anyone's heard of Perl golf.  In Standard golf, you play a 
game with a stick knocking a little white ball around in as few strokes as 
possible.  Of course, we all know that.  In Perl golf, you play to write a 
program that performs a functional description in as few keystrokes as 
possible.

So, in lojban golf - you try to express as much of the message as 
semantically possible, in as few words as possible, using as few 
grammatical constructs as possible.

Fore!
-- 
Sam Vilain, sam@vilain.net

  Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
THOMAS CARLYLE