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Re: [lojban] [oz] Assorted translation questions



ki'e selpa'i

Just one more point about item 1:


On 5 January 2014 14:17, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

Chapter 1

1. {lo zdāni cu kāndi gi'e grųsi kei du'i tu'a ro drāta};


Why the {tu'a}? To me, it is quite normal for dunli1 and dunli2 to be
simple objects.

This topic is one of my specialties. :D

I use BAI in such a way that whenever their source predicate has a sumti place that could integrate the main bridi, then they will do so (I explained the same thing in the {to'e ri'a} thread).

{du'i} is one such BAI. I define it thus:

broda du'i X ~= X dunli lo su'u broda

So, I would say, for example:

   (1) do bajra du'i lo nu lo tirxu cu bajra
       "Your run is like that of a tiger."

It is seldom the case that a concrete object is {dunli} to an abstraction, although it is not impossible. But usually, replacing the X in the above equation with a concrete object will create "non-sense". But we can use {tu'a X} when we don't want to specify the full abstraction, or when it's obvious.

   (2) do bajra du'i tu'a lo tirxu
       "You run like a tiger [runs]"

The expansion of this {tu'a X} is almost always {lo nu X no'a}, which correspsonds to the English in []-brackets in (2).


Fair enough. It is a nice idea.

I personally don't treat the event described by a bridi so much more specially than its other constituents. As you seem to imply, the main bridi can't always fit a sumti place from the source predicate; {bau} comes to my mind.

In my style, two important constituents of the main bridi would fill sumti places of the source predicate, that is, lo zdani and lo ka kandi gi'e grusi. This is not true of your tiger example, where the dunli3 couldn't be exactly lo ka bajra, and admittedly there might be good reason to compare the events instead of the runners.

In any case, I will give your idea some more consideration through future experience.


By the way, it just occurred to me that the original sentence should have a {vau} instead of the {kei}, right? Putting it on the errata.

mu'o
mi'e .asiz.

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