Subject: Re: [lojban] Bible translation

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 20:01:29

la adam cusku di'e

>I have just started translating some psalms into Lojban. I put the
>translations at:
>http://users.aol.com/raizen311/psalms.html

i i'o melbi selfinti
Very nice work!

>A couple of gripes about Lojban grammar:
>
>1) The canonical place structure of "xruti" is *very* strange. It's
>much more Lojbanic, in my opinion, for it to correspond to the
>intransitive verb in English.

Yes, I agree. In fact we had a longish discussion about this a
long time ago (five or six years already?) and if my recollection
is correct, it was decided to change the place structure back
to the intransitive verb (that was how it was originally defined),
before the publication of the dictionary. I can't look for the
pertinent messages now because I can't unzip those archive files
from the old Lojban list. It would be excellent if some of the
people with computer savvy in this list could unzip all those
files and put them up somewhere in an easily searchable format.
Lots of times I've wanted to check something that I know is in
there but I've been frustrated by that zip.

>2) Termsets are awkward for "gapping" (when the selbri of the second
>sentence is implicitly that of the first). With termsets, the terms have
>to be next to each other (with no intervening selbri), and they also add
>extra cmavo. I believe it used to be grammatical to put a bare list of
>sumti after "ije", which would be a much easier and more natural way to
>specify gapping.

You're right, it seems that it is no longer grammatical!
You can still do it without {je}:

i le moklu be mi le nunmi'a cu se culno i le tance be mi
le geirselsanga

but it is strange that you can't do it with {ije}.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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