[lojban-beginners] Re: Questions (literally)

[Scott <scottr@synthiotics.com>]

> > 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.
>
> You might consider "prami danlu" instead. Certainly one legally ponse's
> pets, so it is good enough.

Hmmm.  Yes, "prami danlu" would work.  Is there anything wrong with "satre 
danlu", though?  As far as I can tell (which isn't necessarily very far), 
"satre danlu" would be just as accurate, though in a different way.  
Especially with (in my case) "la ted.", who lives for being petted. 

> > Turning it into lujvo is more than I want to bite off at the moment,
> > so I stuck with tanru.
>
> There is no particular need to turn it into a luvjo, anyways. Besides,
> most people making lujvo shouldn't be doing so. It is a subtle process.

That's kind of what I figured.  Tanru for now.

> > 6)  Do you have any children?
> > 	i. xu do ponse le verba
>
> xu do rirni
> or
> xu panzi do

Yes, that makes sense. 

I am finding that while the Lojban-to-English part of my dictionary is great, 
the English-to-Lojban section is severely lacking.  While I can look "rirni" 
up in the first section and find that it means "children", I cannot find the 
word "children" at all in the second section.  So the dictionary seems more 
useful in translating from Lojban into English, but not so much the other way 
around.

> > 8)  What is your favorite food?
> > 	.i do zanfri ma cidja
>
> Not grammatical. You've got two selbri. I'd go with something like "ma
> poi do zanfri cu cidja"

That sentence gave me trouble (obviously).  I would not have come up with the 
sentence you did, although I see that it is correct.  Gismu are easy, but I'm 
finding cmavo a little more difficult to keep straight.

> la djendjr ji la meri,an
>
> This allows for the best answer of ".e". And captures the vagueness.

I considered that (or something close to that - I didn't think to use "ji"), 
but... is it grammatical?  It seems more like a sentence fragment, as there 
are no gismu (or fill-in-the-gismu statements) in it.  Or does "ji" work to 
do that?

> > 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).
>
> ma se skari lo do cerni gurni tansi

Further trouble with the English-to-Lojban section of my dictionary (and with 
simple cmavo), as I see that you have chosen words that indeed do mean 
"cereal" and "bowl" although neither appear in the English word list.  I may 
need to stop using the dictionary for translations into Lojban and instead 
start doing word searches through the ascii gismu list I have.  Memorizing 
the words is, of course, the better solution, but THAT is going to take a 
while.

Thanks for the corrections!

mu'o mi'e la skat.