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Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Biting off way more than I can chew -- and loving it!
On Apr 11, 2010, at 6:30, Gearhead Shem Tov wrote:
NQ2: OK, the first full sentence in English and my first crack at the
bits of vocab I hazard I'll need, no serious attempt at grammatical
construction yet:
S1: Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper
sky.
L1: martas.dein. [sisti] [catlu--look/observe] [zirpu--
purple] [tunka--copper] [tsani--sky/heavens]
From skimming "What is Lojban?" I think I need some sort of logical
connection between [sisti] and [catlu] to capture the sequential-ness
(how's that for linguistic savvy...) of Martha's actions,
Well, first you need an article.
la.martas.dein. sisti ...
Regarding "paused, looking", that kind of 'is doing both' structure is
usually a bridi-tail connective:
la.martas.dein. sisti gi'e catlu ...
If both actions are specifically occurring at the same time, we could
throw in a tense as well:
la.martas.dein. sisti gi'ecabo catlu ...
Or if they're pausing and *then* looking up:
la.martas.dein. sisti gi'ebabo catlu ...
However, {sisti} may not be as good a word here as {denpa}, since
{sisti} doesn't also mention resuming. Depends on what's said later,
really.
but I also
suppose I might be able to make a tanru out of [purple-tinged copper
sky] just by mooshing them into [zirpu tunka tsani], e.g. a purple-
type-of copper-type-of sky. Would this work, or does it do violence
to the original English meaning and/or lojban?
It works, but I would not care for a Lojban text to contain that sort
of distant metaphor unless it was more metaphorical in general.
A bridi for "colored the same color as copper" would be, most precisely
skari lo se skari be lo tunka
or, cutting it down to "colored as of copper"
skari tu'a lo tunka
or if one finds it acceptable to treat "copper" as a color in clear
context,
skari lo tunka
In order to take a selbri and some sumti and stuff it in a tanru or
sumti (as I did in the first {skari} sentence above), one uses {be},
and we'll need a terminator {ku} to separate it from the rest of the
tanru:
skari be lo tunka ku
Let's put it together. If we want to say the sky is a (purple-ish
copper) color, ordinary tanru grouping happens to be the right thing:
zirpu skari be lo tunka ku tsani
Putting this into the rest of the sentence,
Martha Dane paused , looking up at the purple-tinged copper
sky.
la.martas.dein. sisti gi'e catlu le zirpu skari be lo tunka ku
tsani
Now, it doesn't make much difference here since there's only one sky,
but this is a restrictive rather than incidental description of the
sky. To actually have the intended logical meaning ("looking up at the
sky, which is purple-tinged copper"), we use a {noi} (incidental)
relative clause:
la.martas.dein. sisti gi'e catlu le noi zirpu skari be lo tunka ku'o
tsani
If preserving the original word order is not interesting, one might
put the incidental clause at the end:
la.martas.dein. sisti gi'e catlu le tsani noi zirpu skari be lo tunka
But that might put too much emphasis on the color by making it what
the sentence ends with.
--
Kevin Reid <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>
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