[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

More comments on old material



Two more matters that occurred to me when reading both your answer to
Jack Waugh in JL7 and Athelstan's Saki:

1. Indirect questions (I seem to remember I wrote on this one years
ago!)
In la kalri canko, Athelstan wrote (JL10 p.15):
".i fo'a pensi kucli lenu la mezyz. sepltn. goi ko'u cu speni gi'a
mroselspe". In your answer to Jack (JL7 p.17), you wrote:
"mi se cinri le nike do mansa de'u".
 I think these expressions are unsatisfactory. Your sentence suggests to
me that you had in your mind (with current not contemporary
attitudinals) "a'u zo'e ni do se mansa de'u", whereas the English
suggests your thought "a'u ma ni do se mansa de'u". I would prefer "mi
se cinri le du'u ma ni do se mansa de'u", or to avoid the double
abstraction "mi se cinri ledo pixomei se mansa de'u". Or another
approach is "mi selcniteryrei leni li'o".
 Similarly I would prefer an explicit reivla in the abstraction of
Athelstan's translation. (My own preferred reading of the English would
be "speni gi'i mroselspe", but with Athelstan's reading I would want a
"xu" in there somewhere).

2. Intersections and goi.
Your answer to Jack contains ".i .a'o ko'a goi ri .e ra li'o".
Athelstan writes (p.14) "ko'a goi ge leko'u speni gi leko'u re citno
bruna".
These seem to entail that "ko'a du ri .ije ko'a du ra" or in the other
case "ko'a du le speni po ko'u .ije ko'a du le citno bruna po ko'u".
This is clearly false.
 I think that the problem here is that ".e" would be better replaced by
"jo'u". What I wonder is, how many other places are we using ".e"
inappropriately?

                co'omi'e kolin