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Re: [lojban] beyond good and evil
On 07/07/2010 02:16 PM, Luke Bergen wrote:
So I was browsing a free e-books web-site and saw Nietzsche's "Beyond
Good and Evil" and though "hmmm, now how would one say that in lojban"
(the actual title page of the book was in german or something which is
what made me think of trying to translate the title).
The closest thing that I could come up with was {ze'o co'e lo vrude .e
lo palci}. How should lojban handle vagueness of this kind? Anybody
have any suggestions/critiques?
You're touching on an issue that has been bugging me for years: I want a
new member of LAhE that makes a sumti into a name (maybe. Or maybe
something else). There are all kinds of complicated names for things
out there that we don't seem to handle in Lojban as well as I'd like.
Names which are sentences/phrases ("Dances with Wolves" is an obvious
example, but not a great one, since it really means more like "Dancer
with wolves"), like "They Might Be Giants" (ok, that also could be
better translated as "those that might be giants") or "Touching the
Void" or "Saving Private Ryan"... Other kinds of sentence fragments,
like, say "Blueberries for Sal" {la jbari beseva'u la sal} doesn't seem
right (and not just because of the lousy choice of BAI). Prepositional
phrases like you're talking about: "Beyond Good and Evil," "Between a
Rock and a Hard Place", etc. Descriptions like "Born to Kvetch"... Even
fairly simple ones don't always go over so well. Let alone really
complicated ones like "Chapter four, in which Eeyore Loses a Tail and
Pooh Finds One".
I sort of see some of these working using nu or du'u or maybe even
lu/li'u preceded by a LAhE to turn the quote into a name (without having
to go all the way out to reach for la'o). If we use nu/du'u then we
wind up converting it into a sumti with a gadri and then a name, which
seems roundabout, but is {la nu bandu la poi sonci .rai,n.} really
right? Actually, maybe. But it doesn't seem general enough.
I have to come up with better examples.
~mark
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