Re: Dao De Jing [was Re: Promoting Lojban]

[Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>]

la lindjy'min cusku di'e

> zo robin cusku di'e
>

Surely this means "The word 'Robin' says the following"?!

>
> > la lin. cusku di'e
>
> .i .e'o mi cmene lindjy,min. ko
>

{.ai .izo'o} though given the way this thread's going, I might just start writing {la lindzy}!

>
> (Well, do you think it's more appreciable to use
> ".i .e'o ko te cmene lindjy,min mi" ?)
>

Both are grammatical. I like the first one best, as it seems more, er, Lojbanic, somehow. What I mean is
that someone tranlsating into Lojban would be more likely to feel the {ko} had to go at the front, while a
native of Lojbanistan probably wouldn't.

>
> > Aesthetically I like Gia Fu Feng's best. Technically, I like for Zheng Manqing's commentary, based on
> > the Han commentators', which is available in a rather prosaic English translation (I forget who
> > translated it - one of Zheng's taijiquan students). The problem is that any translation is influenced
> > by a particular school of Taoism (in the case of English translations, usually by Tang dynasty
> > commentators, AFAIK).
>
> BTW, it is recommended that you set the right margin to lesser than 76
> characters, for the convenience of readers working in Un*x boxes.. :-)
>

It's set to 65 characters, so the problem is with your mail server, not my mail.

>
> The book I have is commented by Wangbi (a thinker) in Jin dynasty, in the
> 5th century. I don't know if there is some commentator in Han dynasty
> has noted Daodejing. But I know that the version of Wangbi has some
> misinteprets, according to the explanation of Wang Anshi (poem, prime
> minister in Song dynasty, the 9th or 10th century). When I read the
> book, I refer to two books, one of Wangbi and the one of recent experts
> who adopted the explanation of Wang Anshi.
>

IIRC, Wangbi was a neo-Daoist and emphasised naturalness, spontaneity etc. The Han dynasty commentators
were more into the psychophysiological practices.

>
> I have no idea how English version of Daodejing is like. I've read some
> quotations in books like "the C++ programming language", but the
> translation weirds.. :Q
>

I bet it would.

>
> > (1) Predicate logic and its offshoots are a lot more flexible than Aristotelian logic. I would hope
> > logicians have got to the point where they aren't just relexicalising Greek!
>
> I have no idea about this, since I'm not logician... :-)
> But in our textbook is there only Greek logic. Even fuzzy logic is for
> some advanced people to read.
>

Fuzzy logic is a pretty simple idea, it's just the ramifications of the maths can be a bit tricky when you
actually come to apply it to things like cameras and washing machines.

>
> > (2) Lojban is more flexible than predicate logic.
>
> It's expressive, admittably. But don't forget that we're of our own
> cultures, not of the one of Logbanistan. :-)

So, we get to express our cultures in Lojban. Then other people get to express other cultures in Lojban.
Then it all gets mixed up. Sounds like fun.

co'o mi'e robin.