[lojban-beginners] Re: Tao Te Ching

[Maggie Turner <maggie_lucy@yahoo.co.uk>]

Alexander wrote:

> Hey there, aliksandr. here, lojban newbie and all...
> 
> 
>>- The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
>>.i le rinka poi le nu ke'a se ciksi kei cumki cu
to'e vitno
> 
> 
> The original Chinese for the first line uses "tao"
as a verb for what
> you have as "told". As I understand it, "tao" is not
actually a verb
> and so its use there is a bit unorthodox, so "The
Tao that can be
> Taoed is not the eternal Tao" is probably a better
Chinese-to-English
> translation.
> 
Chinese (especially Classical Chinese) doesn't have a
very strict 
distinction between parts of speech. As far as I
remember, using "dao" 
to mean "go" or "travel" (as well as the more common
translation, "speak 
of") was pretty common in Chinese of that era (the
ideogram shows a 
person on a road). Even now, as Alan Watts points out,
the last three 
characters of that line ("fei chang dao") are used in
signs to mean 
"emergency exit" (in Classical Chinese, "fei chang"
would be parsed as 
two words - "not eternal/permanent" - whereas now they
are read as one 
word, "feichang" - "extreme").

The most literal translation of "dao ke dao fei chang
dao" would 
probably be "The way that can be travelled is not the
eternal way." 
Dao/Tao has elements of "litru", "pluta", "tadji" and
"pruce".

robin.tr



	
	
		
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