[lojban-beginners] Re: "Lupin's left eye is rebelling"

[Andrew Archibald <archibal@math.mcgill.ca>]

coi

In the spirit of the blind leading the blind,

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 08:35:00PM -0500, der Mouse wrote:

> I picked this to try to translate into lojban.  Replacing the pronoun
> with a name, to make up for the loss of context in pulling it out of
> the conversation, I started with "Lupin's left eye is rebelling" (I
> don't think myself good enough to try to get the shade implied by the
> "And" and "too"), I ended up with {le la lupin. zunle kanma cu fapro
> damba mi}.

Well, if we change kanma for kanla, it looks okay, although it has the
extra specific that he's rebelling against you specifically.  I think
it might be a little nicer to say
{le la lupin. zunle kanla cu damba co fapro mi}
making it "fighting (against me)".

Normally, for an eye you'd use {po'e} but of course this is not
actually his eye but a drawing of it.  So {pe} seems appropriate for
"the eye of the picture of..."  If you wanted to make the sentence
more mundane you could say
{le zunle kanla pe le pixra po la lupin. damba co fapro mi}
which says it's the left eye of the picture of Lupin that ...

I may be on the wrong track with the {po}, but it seems
like the only tool to say what a picture is of when it's in a sumti.
What I think I'd like to say is {le (pixra la lupin.)}, the thing
which I call "picture of lupin".  But the CLL says, most
distressingly, "A full theory of sumti-based descriptions has yet to
be worked out", which it follows with a bunch of quite frankly
incomprehensible examples.  It seems like there sould be a way to say
"the thing satisfying predicate P" or "a thing satisfying predicate
P"...  Is this what abstractions do?  It doesn't seem to be, but that
chapter is hard to follow.

Perhaps
{le ko'a poi pe'a pixra la lupin. ku'o zunle kanla cu damba co fapro mi}
is better, but I don't like it much.  I suppose we can translate
"thing x1 such that x1 <selbri> is true" as {ko'a poi pe'a <selbri>}
provided {ko'a} doesn't mean anything yet.

I think we need someone who knows what they're doing. 

ki'e do

Andrew