Subject: LotR opener & ramblings

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 00:39:43 -0700

I felt oddly compelled to try reproducing the Lord of the Rings opener
in Lojban. (I've been listening to this album by Blind Guardian entitled
'Nightfall in Middle-Earth'. Fun stuff.)

The English:

One ring to rule them all,
One ring to find them all,
One ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them.

My Lojban:

le pa djine se finti fi zu'o turni piro zo'e
.i le pa djine se finti fi zu'o facki piro zo'e
.i le pa djine se finti fi zu'o vizbei piro zo'e
.ije nenri fe le manku fa le pu'u rinju kei

The repeated zo'e seems ungraceful, but I don't have a better idea.
(My Lojban kungfu is weak, thank Eris (and Richard Curnow) for jbofihe.)

While I'm writing, I might as well share some Lojban-related ideas I've
had floating around in my mind lately.

1) In an attempt to get more real-worldish Lojbanic text out there, maybe
someone should consider running a news site where the news is written
in Lojban. (Not news about Lojban per se, but stuff like you see on
CNN, etc.)

2) Human-computer interaction is a selling point of Lojban, but there
seems to be little Lojbanic software out there, and even less that
interacts with you.
(a) A library for parsing Lojban and manipulating the resulting parse
tree would be very nice. Then not every piece of software wanting
to deal with Lojbanic input would have to deal with lex and yacc.
(b) Making software output Lojban would be nice, too. It is very straight
forward to translate internationalized UNIX (GNU gettext-using,
anyways) programs into other languages. It would be nice to see a
motivated party producing Lojban translations of common UNIX utilities.

In particular, the KDE project (argh I don't want to start any sort
of desktop flamewar) has very nice tools which can be used to translate
KDE programs into other languages. I've started on converting the
basic portions of KDE into Lojban, but many of the more complex sentences
elude me. If we could get far enough with the translation, it would
most probably be accepted into the KDE official distribution, giving
Lojban another avenue of advertisement. (*cough* Someone is translating
KDE into Esperanto. ;)

Any *NIX users interested in 2a or 2b, please feel free to contact me by
whatever means you like, I'll be happy to discuss it further or give you
pointers to information about the translation process I mention.

(Apologies for grammar and run-on sentences, etc. Its late.)

- Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity
is not thus handicapped -- Elbert Hubbard