Re: Some comparative translations 'n' stuff

[cowan (John Cowan)]

la nik. <nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au> writes:
> Btw, I look forward to a bright future when it won't be just
> la bob. lecevalier. je la djan. ko'an je ju'ocu'i la noras. lecevalier.
> who can answer these queries.

mi go'i cai ("Boy, so do I.")

1) "je" does mean "and", but is not appropriate between sumti.  The grammatical
version of "and" for sumti is ".e".

2) Names:  Bob pronounces his first name bab., whereas I pronounce my
last name kau,n.  Bob is usually called lojbab., which is meant to mean
"lojbanic-Bob" but if you analyze it by the rafsi means logji zbasu or
"logical-soap".  zo'oru'i.

> la banresperanto. nik. (should that be ban,resperanto? I keep wondering how
> to distinguish le'avla from lujvo.)

The answer to the question is "It's a lujvo if it decomposes into rafsi, and
it's a le'avla if it doesn't.  Le'avla are defined negatively: they are all
non-cmavo, non-gismu, non-lujvo, non-cmene."

banresperanto and ban,resperanto mean the same thing:  /ban-res-pe-RAN-to/.
The close-comma is needed only to indicate a nonstandard syllable breakup.
For example, my name djan. kau,n. requires a close-comma to avoid the
monosyllabic reading rhyming with "town".

"la banresperanto. nik." is ungrammatical.  "la", which means "the one
named" or "the one I describe as being" must be followed either by a
description or by (one or more) names, not by a random mixture of the two.

I assume you are trying
to say "Nick the Esperantist".  That would be "la nik. poi prenresperantisto"
or something like that: "the-one-named Nick, such that [he] is-an-Esperantist-
person".  The "prenr-" prefix labels this lea'vla as a kind of person.
Alternatively, if you don't want to borrow "esperantisto", you can make a
tanru and say "la nik. poi banresperanto prenu" which is "the-one-named
Nick, such-that [he] is-an-Esperanto-language type-of-person."

Alternatively still, you can use the nonstandard gismu "spero", which I
proposed for the standard language (but which didn't get accepted):
it means "x1 is Esperanto-related".  In that case your signature becomes
"la nik. poi spero".

> is turning out to be making more
> trouble in Lojbanland (jbonat) than he first suspected. Vicious me. I'll
> say something about the translations of La Espero and le se vaiciska be
> le lojbab ku (is that anything *near* "Bob's masterpiece"?) later.

la jbonat. is called "Lojbanistan" in English.

Your phrase is almost perfect!  However, "lojbab." is a name, and must have
one of the name articles, in this case "la".  It is plain that do spero,
because you use the articles in somewhat random ways, reflecting Esperanto's
single article.  Getting this right is critical to understanding the
language, but for this purpose simply remembering that "la" precedes names
and "le" precedes non-names will go a long way.


-- 
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban