Subject: [lojban] Re: [geofiction] Re: Felichan Kristnaskon!

From: Steven Belknap <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 19:23:14 -0600

On Sunday, December 29, 2002, at 04:15 PM, Robin Turner wrote:

> Steven Belknap wrote:
>
>> .i e'o ko zanlifri la xrismas
>
> You're cheating! The whole point of this exercise is that we have to
> devise excruciatingly complex tanru or lujvo for "Christmas"!

WinterSolstice-family-gluttony-carols-spruce-PeaceOnEarth- 
ChristBirthTime

Ah, to heck with it, Christmas is so overloaded with implications that 
for me its better to just think of it as a name. I find it interesting 
that "Easter" is sort of the same in English. All Continental languages 
have some variant on Pasqua (passover), but the Brits preserved the 
festival of the goddess of the dawn, assigning the tag Easter to the 
Christ-death-deification. I wonder if some of the old Easter cultural 
practices continued as well. (Easter eggs? Easter Bunny?)

>
> I like {zanlifri} though. Apart from the meaning, I think it's more
> elegant than {zanyfri}, and I like the practice of using a full gismu
> for the last element of a lujvo.

I got that practice from lojbab. I think of the last gismu as being the 
"noun" and the rafsi as "adjectives". I find that having the last one 
spelled out helps me to decode the word. It doesn't work as well at the 
beginning.

co'o mi'e la stivn