From gsasha@cs.technion.ac.il Tue Sep 10 15:53:20 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: gsasha@cs.technion.ac.il X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_1_0_1); 10 Sep 2002 22:53:20 -0000 Received: (qmail 22852 invoked from network); 10 Sep 2002 22:53:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m11.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 10 Sep 2002 22:53:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO m3.bezeqint.net) (192.115.106.4) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 10 Sep 2002 22:53:19 -0000 Received: from cs.technion.ac.il (bzq-234-159.red.bezeqint.net [212.179.234.159]) by m3.bezeqint.net (Mirapoint Messaging Server MOS 3.1.0.58-GA) with ESMTP id AEF01254; Wed, 11 Sep 2002 01:53:10 +0300 (IDT) Message-ID: <3D7E4D47.1090502@cs.technion.ac.il> Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 15:51:35 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: How would you translate this? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Alex Gontmakher X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=55923653 Remember the Lord of the Rings, when the party wants to enter Moria, it is written there "Speak, friend, and enter" (which, as it turns out, means: speak "friend" and then enter). How could that be translated to lojban? Or should we make comments describing the ambiguity of the sentence in the natural language. Well, in English it looks like deliberately wrong (the "say friend and enter" would not be that much ambiguous). Probably in Elvish it is cleaner. In other languages I know, the difference also exists, though not as definite as in Lojban. But, can Lojban play this trick at all? mi'e sacas. p.s. Not that I would miss such ambiguities in the language. But if the language cannot translate Tolkien... oops ;-)