LA Group efforts - comments from Nora

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!lojbab>]

Mark's comments on the LA Group's aphorism efforts, as reported by
Peter Thomas, as well as the group-wrok itself, were excellent.
Nora throws in a few more comments:

-  *gicbau in the first aph. has an invalid medial - you want gicybau

-  2nd aph.  you want "su'a ro lo ..."; this appears to possibly be a typo.

-  Mark said this but with different emphasis:  liryrai is misleading
You said that the 'earliest bird gets the worm'.  The superlative is
implicitly singular, unless you are talking about a group of birds.  The
English does not imply that you have to be first, merely that you have
to be early (as in 'early to bed, early to rise ...')

- 3rd aph. translates as 'the set of (all events of non-deciding) is a
decision.  Most 'sets' are incapable of being 'decisions'.  Avoid using
set descriptors unless talking about set properties.  Mark gave two
alternatives 'da vitno ...' which is wrong, and 'roda poi vitno' which
is better.  The first claims only that 'at-least-ONE thing is permanent
iff an event of change' - you need a roda zo'u pn the front to
universalize it; the second claims that 'ALL things which are permanent
are events of change'.  Mark slipped in the bridi-tail version of the first
alternative - nagi'a is not 'just about the same as' gi'o.

Just to show that no one is perfect, I (lojbab) read the first aphorism
>incorrectly< thinking of "ci mi'a fanva" as "three of our translators".
The parser says I'm wrong: a quantifier like that binds more tightly on
the following sumti, giving the desired "three of us are translators".
To get what I read, you would need "ci lo mi'a fanva".  Oops.

In Lojban you don't put a sentence in past tense, unless it is
obligatory for understanding.  Past tense is obvious from context in
your first sentence.

lojbab (for Nora)
lojbab@grebyn.com