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Re: [lojban] The White Knight (Through the Looking Glass)



I really liked this translation, but the urge to tweak (and to preach) are essential parts of a logician's character, so with due apologies to selpa'i for messing with a good job:



ni'o «lu(1,2) lo selsa'a cu clani —sei la xirsoi cu cusku— gi'e ku'i ba'e mutce lo ka melbi .i ro da poi tirna lo nu mi sanga sy zo'u go nai da ba'e klaku gi … li'u»



ni'o «lu go nai klaku gi mo li'u»  (3)nu cusku la .alis. mu'i lo nu la xirsoi pu suksa de'a tavla. (4)


ni'o «lu go nai klaku gi na klaku li'a .i lo cmene be lo selsa'a cu te valpli (5)«lo'u (6) lo kanla be lo xekli'ifi'e le'u»li'u»


ni'o «lu ua .i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu li'u»(3) nu cusku la .alis. /be fau lo nu .abu troci lo ka se cinri /(7)

ni'o «lu na go'i .i do na jimpe —sei la xirsoi /[be?]fau lo nu simlu lo ka se fanza milxe/(8) cu cusku— .i ra (9) ba'e se valpli (5) fi lo cmene .i lo cmene cu ba'e du «lo'u (6) lo laldo laldo nanmu le'u» li'u»


ni'o «lu va'o ku .ei mi pu cusku «lu xu ri se valpli fi lo ba'e selsa'a i'u» —sei la .alis. cu sevzi dragau— li'u» (10)


ni'o «lu ie nai .i .ei na go'i .i [di'u?] frica mutce .i lo ba'e selsa'a cu te valpli «lo'u lo tamsmi jo'u lo tadji le'u»(11) .i ku'i ri fi sy ba'e te valpli po'o .i xu do jimpe li'u»


ni'o «lu .y va'o ku ma ba'e du lo selsa'a —/sei la .alis. noi ca mulno lo ka se cfipu cu cusku/— li'u»


ni'o «lu mi pu pu'o casnu la'e di'u —sei la xirsoi cu cusku— .i lo selsa'a cu ba'e du je'u la (12) .lo nu ca'o zutse lo vrogai. li'u» .i je lo sagzgi(13) cu se finti lo sevzi be mi li'u»

  1. Logician's have an array of separate items that are usually covered by quotation marks. Logjam has had most of these at one time or another (I put a lot of them in myself). Here are just the basic oratio recta uses. Selpa'i uses “European” quotes (those quotes are quotes marking an _expression_ as so-called, not necessarily the right technical word for the referent – but not scare quotes to mark irony, etc. either). In addition to those mentioned in passing logicians also have – significantly here – metaquotes (to form the names of expressions, so that the expressions can be mentioned) and title quotes (to set off the title of a work, its name that might be taken as a different kind of _expression_). Lojban has several quotation expressions but on different principles: parsible Lojban expressions, random Lojban expressions, Lojban words and non-Lojban, which are treated differently by the parser.
  2. I am not sure about the justification for using both the Lojban words for “quote” and “unquote” and also the quotation marks. I assume it is meant to ease the readers' eyes – but then whey not put counter quotes in around the {sei} phrases, which are outside the oratio but within the Lojban quotation phrases. (Braces here are metaquotes to form the names of expressions in Lojban.)
  3. Quote moved to conform to the original and the sense – the earlier {sei} closed the direct quote.
  4. Original had {lo xirsoi} as subject of {suksa}, a process place. This revision is more compact – but I'm not sure that {de'a} can go between {suksa} and {tavla}. {suksasisti lo nu tavla} is safer.
  5. Not distinguishing between the name of something and what it is called misses half the fun of this (if not the joke). Finding the right word for “call” is a problem, since the order of object and word are the reverse of the normal for word words: “x (agent) calls y (object) z (word),” but “z is the name of/ word for y” The compound here, of {pilno} and {valsi} is “p1 uses v1= p2 to refer to v2(=v3?)”. The {se} version with {fi} object give one standard form, the {te} gives “is called” simply (as wanted here). {valsi} is used rather than {cmene} to stress the difference and also to allow that “call” is used for replacements for other than names. {pilno} stress the unofficial and temporary nature of calling – and also is a relief from overworked {gau}.
  6. This is iffy. The phrase enclosed is grammatical Lojban but it is not being used to refer to itself in the usual quotation way but to refer to itself used as the title of a piece (well, strictly the name of a title, but …). So it seems more like metaquote, for we are talking about what it names, not merely displaying it. But it is easily arguable that regular quotes are talking about what they name, namely that they are being said. Still, there is something different here and a logical language ought to notice it.
  7. I don't get the section inside stars (which somehow morphed into boldface). I would have said just {noi troci le ka se cinri}.
  8. Again, I don't quite get it (not sure just how {fau} works for starters) , but {noi simlu lo ka milxe se fanza} works, too.
  9. An anaphora that gives a logician the willies, since there are several “recent” sumti. Maybe a {lo'u bu} is called for here, or at least {ky}.
  10. I have the familiar worries about this but don't see how to get the quote connected to {serzi dragau} directly (it needs a “by doing/ saying”).
  11. Nothing gets this quite right that I can see (partly because I is not clear wtf it means) but {lo tadji jo'u lo tutci} seem a shade better.
  12. Here we want to refer directly to the song. So we use its proper name, despite the convention that puts that in quotes again (title quotes – which confused some logicians into saying the knight got it wrong in the end.)
  13. This is given at {sanga} as the word for “melody” (sorta the same as “tune”?) but then doesn't have a jbovlaste entry – and is a bitch to say. {sa'azgi} is better but still iffy.


On Monday, September 15, 2014 10:37 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:


Logician's love this passage for all the interplay of use and mention that it involves.  The added complication of the difference between what a thing is called and what its name is is just thrown in for free (I think -- Dodgson may have had another agenda there that I don't know about).  I haven't checked to see that the quotes are all in the right place (the usual logicians' worry), except to note that he Knight gets it wrong in the end, since the song *is* "I'll tell you everything I can, .... A-sitting on a gate." or, at the very least, A-sitting On A Gate, but certainly not "A-sitting of a gate." (which is, after all, only the/a name of the song) (but does Lojban still have title quotes?).


On Monday, September 15, 2014 7:56 AM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:



On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 6:46 AM, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

Right. I think I first had {... go nai klaku gi co'e li'u}, but while that maintains grammaticality it doesn't really correspond to being interrupted mid-speech (or just stopping etc). Just like you I don't know what the best general solution would be; I feel like there should be a way to have an ungrammatical chunk inside grammatical text without making the entire text parsefail. I don't know how one would parse human speech otherwise, which is going to be full of incomplete sentences.

Right, human speech is obviously not parsed as a single chunk. The Lojban parser is somewhat unnatural in that sense.
 
One thing that could help is to add a lot more productions to the fragment rule of the grammar. Another solution I pondered involved giving EOF some magic powers so that it can make incomplete sentences parse up to the failure part and just treat the remainder as some sort of meaningless left-over. What's important is that the grammatical part of such a sentence still gets parsed properly.

It wouldn't be EOF though, because we still want to keep parsing what comes after the incomplete sentence. The PEG can be modified so as to allow incomplete sentences, but it means adding a lot of rules. 

I'm not sure about the equally likely case where the mistake happens in the middle of a sentence. Perhaps an external statistical analyser would have to guess what was meant and make corrections accordingly...

I would say mistakes are different from interruptions, so they probably require different treatments.

lo'u-le'u doesn't satisfy me, because 1) it requires you to know in advance that a sentence or text will be ungrammatical (and it's an ugly give-away in a written story), and 2) because text in error quotes does not get parsed, so there is no way to extract meaning from what is said.

Right.

The second comment is about "ba'e" in:

-.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
- na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra ba'e cmene lo cmene

Assuming the emphasis marks the rheme/comment as opposed to the
theme/topic, I would expect the "ba'e" on the second cmene. The first
cmene just repeats Alice's sentence, so it's not what the White Knight
is correcting. I understand the sentence structure is somewhat different
in Lojban than in the original, but the "ba'e" there just sounds off to me.

I know exactly what you mean. When I read the Lojban I had the same feeling, so I went over to the English and found that it was "backwards" as well. {ba'e} on the second {cmene} definitely feels better, I just wasn't sure if I should make a "correction" to the original or if it fit the general weirdness in Alice.

I don't think the original has the same problem, because in the English you have "the name" and "is called", and the White Knight's "the name" does repeat Alice's "the name", and "is called" is the new information. The problem with the Lojban is that there's two "cmene", and the one that is new information comes first and in the same position as Alice's "cmene". If it was a different word, say:

-.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
- na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra ba'e sinxa lo cmene

or:

-.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
- na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra lo cmene cu ba'e sinxa

then it would be easier to follow, because it would be more clear that "lo cmene" is "lo cmene be lo selsa'a". (I'm not saying it would be a better translation though.)

Also the way you have "xu" questioning "lo selsa'a" may add to the garden-pathing. I think "vau xu" would correspond more closely to the original. 

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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