Re: CAFE.INT: su'u xekri

[C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK]

Respondeth Nick in his/her godlike supremacy:

>
> Saith C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK in his/her manifold wisdom:
>

> >It is late at the bar, and the sky is supremely black, seen from the
> >windowed building. (Note 1)
>
> god-like black in the original; "God" prefixed is an emphatic in Greek
> and, I think, Aramaic, but I'm not sure how effective it is in Lojban.
> I meant {se canko se nenri} to denote those contained by the building with
> the windows, but that's obviously a bit too lazy.

"God" prefrixed is emphatic in many forms of English too, but I object to and
will wilfully misunderstand it in Lojban.

Doesn't work. You mean "nenri", not "se nenri" (as I suspected), but however
you do it, the "se canko" modifies the "nenri" not the "se nenri".  Hmmm...
how about "se ke selca'o selne'i"? I think it works, but it would give me
kittens if I came upon it in a text.  (.... like a good deal of the present
text.... zo'o).
>
> >Far away, a black chaos of terrible black holes, destroying and creating
> >with fearful strength and violence. (Note 2). And right here, the same sort
> >of thing going on.
>
> I was lazy with the place structure of {kalsa} too, mandating that it
> be "a chaos of...", which I'd already translated in Colossal Cave as
> {kalsysu'a}. The same sort of thing going on in a *social* sense.

As I said, I had some problem with UI in your text.  So pe'i did you. ROhA
(he said, arbitrarily inventing a purely formal subclass of UI, but you
know what I mean) are specifically defined as "emotion category/modifier" -ie
they modify the speaker's attitude about the utterance, whether that is
expressed or not. Consequently what you've said is that you have some feeling
on a social scale about the sentence, NOT that it is true in a social kind
of way. This is what I meant by my comment about "vusai". I think you're
trying to get a sort of back-door tanru modification, and committing a
category error.
 (What's the Lojban for 'flame off'?)


> ba'anaita'o is three cmavo.

.o'onairu'ero'a srera .i do zu'unai drani

Having said which, I'm not sure what it means. I've a feeling I know what
you meant by it, viz "unexpectedly, somebody started to sing". Another
category error. "ba'a" is about the quality of information in the statement -
I suggest that "ba'a" means "Whatever it is I'm claiming is not something I
know for a fact, but something I expect to be so", and contrasts with "za'a" and
"ka'u" (I think it can co-occur with "ti'e" and "ja'o" however). I'm not
sure what kind of negation is "ba'anai" (possibilities are "I'm stating this
but I don't actually expect it to be true"; "I assert this with an evidential
other than ba'a, such as za'a"; or "I expect that the converse of this is
true").

Either way, I don't believe it can convey the attitude that I think you mean
here - I would suggest something on the lines of ".ueru'e" or "i'ucu'i".

>        That's "black" in the bar.
>
> There's a blackness going on in the bar.

I was trying to get over the deliberate vagueness of "su'u".


> Hm. Should I publish my own intended translation of the complete piece,
> or wait for you all to have done with it?
>

I'd like to have a go at the other half first.  Maybe next week.