Lojban analogies and kennings

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@apocalypse.org>]

Greetings from a semilurker...

A few people on the list know of my artgame Kennexions. If you don't, 
you can learn more about it here:

   <http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/kennexions.html>

Lojban is a central part of the game, but I find my Lojban is 
deficient for some of the things I want to do. That's why I'm 
delurking; I'm hoping for help with some basic questions. But first 
some background:

A central part of Kennexions is forming "kennings," which are an 
ancient Norse poetic form based on analogies. Example:

   E1. psychology : mind :: biology : body

   E2. Psychology is to the mind as biology is to the body.

   E3. psychology = mind biology

E2 above is a restatement of E1 in ordinary English. E3 shows a 
kenning ("mind biology") which is a poetic restatement of the word 
"psychology."

You may have noticed that "mind biology" resembles a tanru. Because 
kennings can easily be expressed by tanru (as can the Aztec poetic 
form of "difrasismo," but that's another story), and because Lojban 
is formal enough to be parsed by computer, I have chosen Lojban as 
the basis for my "game language."

Right now, I can generate kennings automatically (with a Perl script) 
from tabular data such as Aleister Crowley's book _777_, a rich 
source for analogies in the domain of mythology. I can also manually 
build geometrical kenning game structures in Fluidiom (formerly 
Struck) -- see <http://www.beautifulcode.nl/>; it turns out that 
kenning analogies map prettily onto tetrahedra. Eventually I would 
like to have a Perl script that can parse Lojban, then spit out a 
file to be rendered in Fluidiom.

As a small step, I've been trying to figure out how to write 
analogies in Lojban. Assuming that "biology" is "ji'eske" and 
"psychology" is "menske" (please correct my lujvo), then could the 
above be rendered thus?

   L1. menske : menli :: ji'eske : xadni

   L2. .i ke menske tai menli ke'e tai ke ji'eske tai xadni ke'e

   L3. .i menske du menli ji'eske

I'm pretty sure L3 is ungrammatical; what's wrong with it? And how 
about L2? (I know that L1 is completely ungrammatical; it's just 
shorthand.)

Thanks in advance for everybody's help.

Ron H-E
--
Ron Hale-Evans: rwhe@apocalypse.org & http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/
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