[lojban] Re: Specifying natural language ambiguity in Lojban translation?

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Friday 18 December 2009 09:02:39 Oren wrote:
> Is there a feature of lojban for this? For example, lets say I have three
> bad puns:
>
> pa What did the fish say when it hit a wall? Dam
> re The blind man picked up his hammer and saw.
> ci Why did the vampire snowman die? Frostbite
>
> Let's say we also had a comprehensive English -> Lojban dictionary that
> could recognize (1) homophones, (2) multiple word senses and (3) possible
> novel compounds. If we then also had some sort of meta-markup that could
> tag one or more lojban tokens as correlating to an English word or sound,
> these types of plays on words could be described.
>
> If there isn't part of the language that does it already, here's what I
> imagine it looking like functionally:
>
> { .i zo'e zo'e <?lang:en lemma="dam" sampa="d{m"?> zo'e zo'e }

If I understand you right, you can do this with a type-1 fu'ivla: "me la'o gy. 
dam .gy". But I'd rather make puns in Lojban than try to translate English 
puns, just as if I'm speaking French or Spanish, I make up puns in those 
languages. L'aveugle traverse la route et la voie. The difference in Lojban 
is that it doesn't have, except in cmene, two identical-sounding words with 
completely different meanings, and it doesn't have two words spelled the 
same, such as "axes", which are pronounced differently. But there are words 
that sound similar but have different meanings (in Alice, I often 
confused "noltruni'u", the Queen, and "noltroni'u", the Duchess). Speaking of 
axes:
lu li'o le nu le terdi cu carna le jendu cu cacra li revo li'u
i lu lo'e nu catra zo'u sei la noltroni'u cu cusku ko vimcu le stedu ti li'u

mu'omi'e .pier.

-- 
When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates.
Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.


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