[xod@bway.net: Re: [lojban] Re: Dao De Jing [was Re: Promoting Lojban]]

[Lin Zhemin <ljm@ljm.qqjane.net>]

----- Forwarded message from xod <xod@bway.net> -----

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 22:07:57 -0500 (EST)
From: xod <xod@bway.net>
To: Lin Zhemin <ljm@marx.ljm.wownet.net>
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Dao De Jing [was Re: Promoting Lojban]

On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Lin Zhemin wrote:

> Mon, 22 Feb 1999, la xod(xod@bway.net) cusku di'e
> > still permits sentences which violate logic, like the two-headed cow
> > example.
> 
> But why do you think the "two-headed cow" is illogic?
> To me, it's logic, as we have some mythology about "two-headed snack",
> "nine-headed dragon".
> 
> > Illogical statements are hard for everybody to understand.
> 
> Maybe there are some intercultural problems. Illogical statements are
> very easily _accepted_ for (at least) Chinese people, and peoples
> influented by Chinese culture. Maybe it's due to the language. We
> tended to eliminate many words in one sentence in ancient time. Like
> some religious sentences like:
> 	No outside, no inside.
> 
> which means:
> 1)There isn't something called "outside", nor "inside"
> 2)Nothing's outside, nothing's inside.
> 3)The status of someone(something) is neither outside nor inside.
> 
> But all the translations lost something original. However, it's quite
> acceptable to (at least) Chinese people. People in Lojbanistan may feel
> hard understanding this sentence {[da zo'u] da nalbartu .i da nalne'i}.
> And adding [da zo'u] for the grammaticalisation violates some original
> meaning.


Maybe it would be hard to translate the Dao De Jing into Lojban! The
English translations are full of word games like that.

Also, "No inside, no outside" is not grammatical English. It is not a real
sentence, but a sentence fragment. But we are accustomed to broken
sentences in English if the text is not an official document. In Lojban so
far we are incredible sticklers for grammatical correctness! This rigor is
probably only observed with classical, literary situations. These rules
get bent probably on any street corner in the world.



> 
> > "lo nanmu cu ninmu" is valid lojban. No parser will reject it. It follows
> > the same pattern as "lo nanmu cu xekri". But it's illogical!
> > (unambigiously so!)
> 
> Such sentence can be translatted in Chinese, as
> 	n"uren ye shi nanren. (Women also-are men).
> 

But my sentence goes even farther than that! It doesn't say that the men
are also women (both at once) , but that the true men are true women!


> Well, in some philosophical books, such sentence appears often, 'cause
> the structure of Chinese grammar permits doing so. We'd suppose there
> are something omitted before/after the sentence, like
> 	(zon zhege guandian kanlai,) n"uren ye shi nanren
> 	(From this point of view), women are also men.
> 
> So it is never illogical (but somewhat ambiguous) in Chinese. I know
> that it is definitely illogical in Lojban (since you've used {lo}),
> though. But what about {da poi nanmu zo'u da ninmu} ?
> :-)

This means "there is something such that it is a man and a woman"?

{ta'o} are you in China right now? I'm in NYC, so is Chelsea.


> 
> -- 
> 
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