punchlines

[Ivan A Derzhanski <cbmvax!uunet!COGSCI.ED.AC.UK!iad>]

>  Date:     Thu, 2 Apr 1992 20:33:35 LCL
>  From: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster <POSTMASTER@EARN.CUVMA>
>
>  I must apologise for that (I like apologising for things beeyond my control
>  <...>)

You ought to say {.u'use'inai}.

>  ru'azo'o loire jvixi'a casnu vi lo xalgusta

This sentence no bridi.  'Tis {cu casnu} or {ca'o casnu}.

>  lo cizra pe mi pu fasnu

{lo cizra mi pu fasnu} should suffice.

>  .iva'i mi bajryjvi fo le zemoi bele'inu xirma bajryjvi

The ve jivna should be the prize, not the competition.  Or?

>  .i mi zemoi le'i jivna leka sinxa selme'e

Is this the alphabetical order of names, or what?

>  .i le remoi cu bacru lu cizra caicai

I've always thought nine grades of uification were more than enough.
{caicai} is perhaps unnecessary.

>  .i le mintu cu fansu mi <...>
>  .imu'ibo le mintu cu fansu mi

{fasnu} on both occasions.

>  .i lere xirma cu simxu catlu seci'o leka manci .ibazibo le xirma cu bacru lu
>  .uecaicai.u'e le gerku pu'i tavla li'u
>
>  Now if the joke was being told in Korean, the greyhound would add:
>
>  lu .ua mi jimpe .i do cfipu ki'u lenu mi noi gerku cu tavla .i lenu go'i cu
>  xajmi ki'u lenu do noi xirma cupa'a naka'e da'inai tavla li'u
>
>  In my culture, this is how you kill a joke.

I reckon it is my turn to confess that I have no clue as to where to
look for the punchline, with or without the Korean supplement.  Help!  :-)

>  And because the delivery of jokes <...> is so
>  culture-dependent, jokes in Lojban will prove problematic.

Yes, it seems my failure with this one proves that.

>  By the way, as you'll find if you download the lastest ma'oste off the PLS,
>  we killed {du'a} the BAI ages ago (it used to mean {fi'o dunda}).

I use the valste as of 15/8/90.  My system greets me every day with a
hostile message about how many hundred Kbytes (and within how many
days) I am to remove from my account, so I can't dream of downloading
anything from anywhere.  I used to be on the Gaelic list; I left it
because I had no room to store the stuff from it.

>  The feeling
>  was that this was prepositionese, and it was more appropriate for Lojban
>  (not a prepositional language, at least not according to Nora) to express
>  the "dative" of tedu'a as a separate bridi.

It is as prepositional as a language can be.

>  (Though you could argue the use of {seci'o} above is just about as
>  prepositionish).

Yes, that's where I come in with things like {... cusku beleka manci
be'o ke simxu catlu}.  But to my ear {terve'u dunda} is a bad way of
saying `buy * for *'.

Ivan