From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Sat Dec 02 07:46:10 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: iad@math.bas.bg X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_3_1_2); 2 Dec 2000 15:46:10 -0000 Received: (qmail 98813 invoked from network); 2 Dec 2000 15:46:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 2 Dec 2000 15:46:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta1 with SMTP; 2 Dec 2000 15:46:07 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp125.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.125]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.9.3/8.9.0) with ESMTP id RAA13159 for ; Sat, 2 Dec 2000 17:48:14 +0200 Message-ID: <3A29187F.3CE773F8@math.bas.bg> Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2000 17:42:55 +0200 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: "common" words References: <90950c+t27f@eGroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote: > --- In lojban@egroups.com, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: > > The problem is that the English version doesn't say what the > > Chinese says. The title is _zhi1 yin1 he2 chu4 xun2_ lit. > > `know sound what place seek', that is, `Where to look for a > > connoisseur of music'. > > No, it isn't sufficient to "translate" each of the two Chinese > words separately, the compound's semantics indeed is "intimate > friend", one has to know this! Bummer. That's what happens when one doesn't read dictionary entries in their entirety. Mea culpa, .ionaicaise'iro'e. _Yu2chun3 de hen3 le._ (·MÄø±o¬½¤F¡C) However ... > Yet, just reading the English equivalent means to lose the very > _concrete_ meaning behind this expression, i.e. a whole story, Exactly. I was going to say that both meanings are present in the Chinese title, and the literal one is relevant because the story is about understanding (_zhi1_) music (_yin1_), but now I see that the story actually brings this into the foreground. So we are here in the presence of a pun. Translating such is never easy, least of all when the target language is Lojban, which favours unambiguous expression. > > Btw, the Chinese describes Po-ya as _ren2_, not _nan2_, > > so {prenu} is more precise than {nanmu}. > > Again no, since one has to consider the meaning of ren2 ¤H > *in this context*: it isn't just "person", but "man" (human > male)! One cannot stick to *single* words meaning. Yet _ren2_ ¤H is not the same thing as _nan2_ ¨k, is it? Do I take it that in this context we know that the person is male, because otherwise _nü3_ ¤k would've been employed, sort of when one says in German `Es war einmal ein Mensch', and people know it wasn't a woman, because then one would have said `... eine Frau'? If so, how strong a point does the narrator want to make of the musician's sex? Note that the sex of the listener is not so indicated; a {pendo} can be female as well as male. --Ivan