It's been my experience over decades that translation is not the best first step to learning a language. One should try to learn the language to some (perhaps low) level of competence before attempting serious translation.
OTOH, I'd really like to see a good translation of "Omnilingual".
On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 1:06 AM, Gearhead Shem Tov
<bnansel@internode.on.net> wrote:
This is my first post about lojban ever. I'm a Yank expat living in
Adelaide, South Australia. I'm a recovering engineer, a published SF
author, and I'm currently studying to be a sculptor (long story...).
I'm also a dire lojban newbie, and after years of furtive peeks at
the language, I want to finally make a serious attempt to learn it. I
propose as my first foray into lojbanistan a short story translation.
In the spirit of "anything worth doing is worth overdoing" and since I
have a science fiction writerly disposition, the logical point of
departure for me would be to translate a substantial SF story.
I have studied a couple languages very different to English -- two
years each of Japanese and German, with a smattering of Hebrew,
Russian, Spanish, and Swedish (and FORTRAN, Pascal, Modula 2, and
Forth :), so I know this project is very ambitious. I figure I'll
take it a sentence at a time with the notion that I'll have to ask
lots of naive questions and my translations will be crap at the
outset. As I progress I hope my questions will become monotonically
more interesting and the translation correspondingly smoother. To
keep me motivated I would probably blog the whole process (unless
somebody has a better suggestion); perhaps other beginners would find
such a blog of interest.
But what story to translate? I wouldn't want to use any of my own
published stories (my ego is large, but not that large). It would
need to be another author's story, a story that I admire that is
either in the public domain or the translation rights to which I could
easily obtain. It would be a bonus if the story had something to do
with linguistics and translation, something that would force me to
thoroughly grasp lojban meta-language constructs beyond learning
workaday gismu, cmene, and cmavo.
By chance a few days ago I came across my favourite H. Beam Piper
story online, Omnilingual from Astounding Stories, 1957. To my
astonishment I found it is available as a Project Gutenberg text.
It's some 16K words -- about 1K sentences. OK, so it's more a novella
than a short story. Still, I reckon it would take me a year if I
average three sentences per day.
So, here is Naive Question # 1 (NQ1):
In my cursory reading of lojban orthography I've found no instance of
an mn consonant cluster, but neither have I found a rule clearly
forbidding it. Would .OMni.LINguyl. be a reasonable -- or even legal
-- lojbanisation of "Omnilingual"? Or would it need to be more
like .omyniLINguyl. ?
Thanks!
-Bobby
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