senseless acts of beauty

["Mark E. Shoulson" <cbmvax!uunet!CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!shoulson>]

>Date:         Sat, 28 Dec 1991 10:44:31 PST
>From: David Cortesi <infmx!godzilla!cortesi%UUNET.UU.NET@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu>
>X-To:         Lojban mailing list
>        <uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!lojban@uunet.UU.NET>


Nice work, David!  You missed a few points, though.  Let's see how many I
miss.


>   Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
>I just had to try to translate it.  You will probably be able to improve
>on the following attempt:
>   ko di'i tigni ge zu'o spaji fi ka xendo
>                  gi zu'o li no te zukte li'i melbi
>Literal back-translation (Vocabulary used is at end of message):
>   ko di'i tigni ge
>   you! repeatedly-perform both:
>                  zu'o spaji fi ka xendo
>          activity-of [you] surprise [zo'e] by quality-of be-kind-to
>                  gi zu'o li no te zukte li'i melbi
>          and activity-of the-zero reason-for-act-of
>                          experience-of beauty

>Analysis & feeble justifications:

>   omission of "le" before "zu'o," "li'i," "ka" etc.

>Not sure about this: "zu'o [bridi]" like any abstractor is a sumti, and
>the added indirection of "le zu'o [bridi]" does not seem necessary to
>me.  But this is an area that puzzles me and I would appreciate
>comment.

Not exactly.  "zu'o [bridi]" like any abstractor is a *selbri*, not a
sumti, so you *do* need the "le".  "nu klama /kei/" is a *selbri* meaning
"x1 is an event of [something] going [somewhere, etc...]"  If you want a
selbri, you need "le nu klama".  In this situation, I'd recommend "lo" or
"loi", since you're not being specific.

>   "[You] practice..."

>It seems to me that "ko di'i tigni" is better here than possible
>alternatives such as "ko di'i rinka."  I realize "tigni" probably has
>the sense of a theatrical performance.  That is precisely the meaning I
>get from the English: these acts should be done "for effect,"
>demonstratively; hence theatrically.

Personally, I don't get quite that impression from the English, but your
interpretation is certainly reasonable. To me, the "Perform" seems more
like "practice" or just "do".  I don't see the "for effect" that you do,
but as I said, it makes sense either way.

>   "random kindness"

>Feel free to do something with "cunso" (random); I decided to focus on
>the element of surprise, which seemed central to me.  The x3 of "spaji"
>is the act that causes the surprise, which was convenient: "spaji fi ka
>xendo" is exactly "surprise with kindness."

Yah.  Apart from needing "le ka xendo", your interpretation holds water.
Other ways of looking at it exist, too.  Not necessarily that surprise is
important, but maybe actually randomness, or being inconsistent and
unpredictable about it.  Then again, your usage puts the emphasis more on
the surprise than on the kindness.  Maybe a tanru?  For literal
translation, you could get "lo cunso zu'o te xendo" (random activities of
kind-events... uuh, sorta.  bad translation).  That uses "cunso" to be
*realy* literal (perhaps at the expense of the meaning).  Note that here I
use the fact that zu'o [bridi] is a selbri and thus can be part of a tanru.

>   "senseless acts"

>"Mu'inai" could have been useful here, had it not already been
>preempted (per the cmavo list) to mean "despite motive...".  So: how
>does one deny the existence of a sumti?  A senseless act is a "zukte"
>for which there is no x3.  The best I could find for this was "li no."
>Since this was the important element I brought it to the front.  "li no
>te zukte" is an act whose motivation is zero, nought.  However, zero is
>a real thing, and a senseless act is one with no real motive.  (Perhaps
>"the empty set" would do for a motive, if I knew how to say it?)

"li no" is not what you want.  You really do want "empty set", and there is
a way to say it: use existential variables, quantified to zero.  That is,
"noda".  "te zukte" isn't really motivation, it's purpose. The senseless
acts of beauty may not have a motivation, you're just doing them for the
hell of it, but they may indeed have a purpose (beautifying the world or
something).  I'd stick with "mu'i noda" or even "se mukti noda":

lo zu'o melbi kei bemu'i noda
or
lo zu'o melbi kei poi se mukti noda

Note that these aren't really quite what the English has.  "lo zu'o melbi"
is "act(s) of being beatiful".  You might want to hit tanru again, this
time using "zukte" (even though it means "act with purpose"; I think
there's enough purpose in the English sentence to allow this... maybe not):

lo melbi se zukte bemu'i noda (beautiful (activitie(s) motivated-by nothing))
or, with a slightly different grouping
lo ke melbi se zukte ke'e be mu'i noda ((beautiful activities) mot-by nothing)
or, to zero out the otherwise ellipsized "purpose" place of zukte, if you
like:
lo melbi se zukte befi noda (beatiful (activities with-purpose: none))

Needless to say, there are other interpretations for this, but yours is
certainly reasonable (probably better than any I could think up).

So, keeping to your interpretation, fixing the grammar...

   ko di'i tigni ge lo spaji (zu'o) te xendo
                 gi lo ke melbi se zukte ke'e bemu'i noda

You! regularly-perform both: surprising-thing act(s)-of: kind-actions
        and (beautiful-activities) motivated-by nothing.

Note that I'm not sure if you want the "zu'o" there, since the x3 place of
kendo already implies doing something.  Similarly, you might want "te
spaji" instead of "spaji", depending on how you mean some of the finer
points of this all.

Well done, and have fun picking apart my mistakes.
~mark