[lojban-beginners] Questions (literally)

[Scott <scottr@synthiotics.com>]

Alright, I thought it might be fun to come up with a short list of lojban 
questions to potentially be used as an introductory exercise for newbies 
(definitely such as myself).

It turns out, of course, that just coming up with the questions was an 
exercise in its own.  Forget the answers.  Newbie that I am, I am sure that I 
butchered the grammar as I was hunting through my various lojban sources.

So, I'd like to present the questions themselves, not so much to be answered 
as just to have someone take a look at them and see if they are properly 
constructed.  I did run into one question that I was unable to translate at 
all, and one or two that I had to resort to homegrown tanru for.  Some I 
definitely have my doubts about, both as to grammar and word choice.  

So, here they are:

1)  What is your name?
	.i ma cmene do

2)  Where do you live?
	.i do xabju ma

3)  What do you do for a living?
	.i do gunka ma

4)  Do you have any pets?
	.i xu do ponse le satre danlu
There is no word for "pet" in my lojban dictionary (the one I generated at 
jbovlaste), so I had to make this one up.  Turning it into lujvo is more than 
I want to bite off at the moment, so I stuck with tanru.

5)  Are you married?
	.i xu do speni

6)  Do you have any children?
	i. xu do ponse le verba
I'm not sure about this one.  For some reason that I can't quite put my finger 
on (probably relating to "ponse"), something in this sentence doesn't feel 
right to me.  But it's the best I can do at the moment.

7)  What hobbies do you have?
This one completely stumped me.  My dictionary doesn't contain any word for 
"hobby".  I tried coming up with tanru for "fun activities", but could not 
find any word for "fun".  The best I could come up with was "cinai zu'o", 
which is, of course, not a tanru at all and I am too unskilled to put the 
words together properly in a sentence yet.  So, this one remains 
untranslated.

8)  What is your favorite food?
	.i do zanfri ma cidja

9)  Ginger or MaryAnn?
	.i xu do nelci la .djendjr .onai la .meri,an.
It's ungrammatical in English, and only readily understandable to an older 
portion of American males anyway.  But I thought I'd throw it in there.  At 
least I attempted to make it grammatical in lojban.

10)  What color is your cereal bowl?
	.i le cerni sanmi palta cu skari ma
My dictionary contains no word for cereal or for bowl.  So I settled for a 
"morning meal plate" tanru, which really doesn't convey what I wanted it to 
(especially since "plate" is entirely the wrong word).

Surprisingly, considering the simplicity of the questions, it took me an hour 
to come up with just those.  Please check them over and let me know how well 
I did just putting them together.  If you can think of better translations, 
definitely let me know what those might be (and, of course, why).

mu'o mi'e la skat.