Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Le Petit Prince: Can we legally translate it?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 21:41:01 EDT

In a message dated 9/11/2002 5:21:31 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> We could always translate linguistics, something we are used to doing 
> %^) Comrie, who has interest in constructed languages, would seem a person 
> 
> likely to give permission to translate, perhaps especially his Typology 
> book which was germinal in my early Lojban design effort.
>>
Nice if we can get modern stuff, but things out of copyright range from 
unintelligible to clearly abominations -- especially the stuff in English.

<<
Among modern philosophers, I would presume from references in Usenet 
discussions that Wittgenstein is probably the most widely read, with there 
being much reference to Popper for falsifiability in philosophy of science, 
though I don't think many have actually read him. (I've never read either 
and have no idea whether they are positivists.)

The problem is to find things to translate that people want to read. I 
would be even less likely to read philosophy in Lojban than in English, and 
I don't read it in English %^)
I suspect Usenet has it about right. Mad Ludwig wrote only in German, so he 
might be a useful person for a German speaker to take on, if copyright 
allows, and much of Popper was originally German. Popper is clearly a 
positivist, Wittgenstein is proto- in the Tractatus and post- in the 
Investigations, with a bunch of papers that lie between.
To the last I can only say "Me too and it is my pidgin"

bjoern: (mein Schreiber kann nicht die Mund rund machen)
<<
back up a bit more and you get to john stuart mill, or even further back to 
thomas hobbes, john locke, and george berkley, to name a few enlish language 
philophers who influenced logical positivism. but then again, they might have 

written in latin;)

on the other hand, if logical positivism is in such demand, why not do 
summaries in lojban instead of translations?
Mill is a possibility (picture of me at his statue somewhere or other -- I 
lose track), the earlier people are probably not writing in modern English 
(most of Locke's stuff is not in Latin, Hobbes is fifty-fifty, and Berkeley 
and Hume wrote Latin not all all for anything interesting). The quarter-page 
sentences with six dependent clauses, stacked three deep was hard to read 
then (when people, lacking tv, had too much time) and impossilbe now. But it 
might go smoothly into Lojban, which si set up better for it than English. 
The preces might be good, but some much of the neat stuff is in the details. 
Hume's Dialogs on Natural Religion or Berkeley's Bewtween Hylas and Philonous 
might get around both those problems somewhat.