Phone Game goes Bowling

[cbmvax!uunet!mullian.ee.mu.oz.au!nsn]

(Lojbab's extensive comments in the following are preceded as #)

Sylvia was started off with the following, not too charitable phrase:

The second last time I went bowling with my pals, I'd already started getting
those pains in my thigh that were to prove so disruptive in the tournament the
week after...

#1. Nora observes that the first phrase sounds very stilted in her
#dialog:  "the second last time" might or might not mean "the next to the
#last time".

#2. "went bowling" is a single event of bowling, but does not imply a
#single game.

I suppose the cmavo {pu'e} and {mu'e} would help make the distinction
between "playing" and "game", "competing" and "competition"? Not *that*
sure...

#3. "disruptive" - "disrupt" is a tricky word with at least 4 gismu that
#can serve to translate it, at least in this adjectival form.  I give the
#draft gismu list place structures (already modified to reflect this game)
#
#dicra interrupt 'disturb, disrupt' x1 (event)
#interrupts/stops/halts/(disrupts) x2 (object/event/process) due to
#quality x3; (cf. zunti, fanza, raktu)
#
#fanza annoy x1 (event) annoys/irritates/bothers/distracts x2; (cf.
#raktu, dicra, zunti); "is disruptive to"
#
#raktu trouble x1 (event) troubles/disturbs x2 (person) causing
#problem(s) x3; (cf. dicra, fanza, zunti); afflicts, is disruptive to
#
#zunti interfere 'hinder' x1 (evt./state) interferes
#with/hinders/disrupts x2 (evt./state/process) due to quality x3 (ka);
#'blocks/obstructs', not necessarily forcing cessation (cf. dicra, fanza,
#raktu)
#
#We agreed that "zunti" would have been the correct word based on our
#collective understanding of the original.  Normal usage in our
#idiolects, tend to use the adjective "disruptive" to apply to behavior
#that disturbs, troubles, or bothers other individuals, i.e. fanza or
#raktu.  It rarely is used to make an implication that it actually
#prevents or halts any other activity, but rather, with events, tends to
#imply interference.  The verb "disrupt", however, can suggest an
#interruption and perhaps even termination of an event, and tends not to
#be used for interpersonal interaction.  I note the SF coinage "disruptor
#beam" based on this sense.  I think the existance of this sense of the
#verb is what caused the "disrupt/dicra" pairing to survive so long
#(through Sylvia, Nora, and Mark) after Sylvia first selected "dicra".

#However, without real-world knowledge, it is quite believable that one
#person's suffering a severe injury could actually interrupt some kinds
#of tournament (not likely in bowling, but in car racing it often
#happens, and if the first seed in a tennis tournament had a heart attack
#in the middle of a match, the match would almost certainly be
#temporarily stopped.)


Sylvia's translation was:

.i ca le relpru ke bolgu'o nunkelci poi kansa le mi pendo ku'o tu'a mi
pu pu cfari le li'i cortu le mi zagylamtu'e kei poi pu ba dicra tu'a
le grinunjvi ca le bavlamyjeftu

Nora kibbitzed at that point that both 'y's in the lujvo are unnecessary,
and thus, strictly speaking, wrong. I wouldn't be too fussed about that;
I doubt anyone outside Fairfax VA has quite got the hang of lujvo-making
rules.

{relpru} is a bit rough'n'ready for "second previous", but I don't see
why it shouldn't be acceptable. {bolgu'o nunkelci} is excellent. Though
the {kansa} phrase is not per se ungrammatical, it does seem a bit odd:
the empty places fill in as {poi mi kansa lemi pendo ke'a}. The obvious
fill-in, {poi ke'a kansa}, is implausible, but one does have to stretch
the intuition to get the intended meaning. Is Sylvia's phrasing a Good
Thing (tm)? It's not really wrong, but in "careful" (tm) speech, I'd
tend to avoid it as too confusing potentially.
Is {dicra} the right term for disrupt? I think {zunti} is more appropriate.
The remainder of the translation, in word construction, syntax, and meaning,
is excellent. Granted, it is still one sentence, and a complex one; if
stylistics ever arises, we might prefer to somehow (dunno how) split the
thing up into two sentences. Good work, in any case.


#1. I propose "ca le pu da'amoi ke bolgu'o nunkelci ...", or using newer
#rafsi assignments for the cmavo "dazmompru" (but I don't like this as
#much).

{dazmompru}? Hey, *I* like it :)

#4. "cfari" has been made intransitive somewhere along the way to the
#current draft gismu list; I believe that the PLS long-form list already
#has this change.  Current draft definition:

#cfari initiate x1 (state/event/process)
#commences/initiates/starts/begins to occur; (intransitive verb)

#Sylvia used an older list with a transitive construction and had to go
#tu'a to try to capture the enigmatic x1 of transitive "initiate".  The new
#place structure would probably suggest (lojbab's attempt:)

#"ri'i mi pupu selcfa le li'i mi cortu ..."

I'd prefer plain {pupu cfari fa leli'i mi cortu}.

#[] I would have used
#"ca'o" as the first word of this text instead of "ca", and the
#rephrasing I just gave in 4. would be expressed better as:

#"mi co'a lifri leli'i cortu ..."

#This is much better than "pupu" which is an old Loglan variety of
#perfective that models English more or less but works poorly in contexts
#of events of duration.  Note that the original text "I'd already started
#getting those pains" can be read as "pupu" only if you are going along
#word-for-word on the English.  Sylvia's Lojban suggests that the pains
#had started BEFORE that penultimate bowling game, but I suspect that the
#broad colloquial sense of the phrasing is that the pains started during
#that penultimate session, or the speaker would have said something like
#"By the second last time" to imply that it had started some unspecified
#time before then.  But then the "already" qualifier on started may also
#imply this - as I said earlier, this is an unfamiliar idiolect, and the
#intended time ordering of the English is somewhat obscure.

#Given the "ca" phrase on that first clause, Sylvia only needed a single
#"pu" on "cfari" in her version to effectively get the compound tense
#"capu", which accurately reflects "At specific past time ... x1 had
#started", without the confusing "already".  Without the "ca" clause,
#"pupu" translates as "had earlier" - with it, she has the semi-obscure
#"capupu" which definitely implies that the pains started before that
#penultimate bowling session.  Note below that Nora did NOT pick up on
#this, though, the first of her mistakes

Ick. Lojban story tense :)

#7. "poi pu ba dicra tu'a le grinunjvi ca le bavlamyjeftu"
#"that were to prove so disruptive in the tournament the week after..."

#The English is unclear as to whether "the week after" restricts "the
#tournament" or modifies the predicate "prove so disruptive".  Sylvia did
#not use "pe ca le bavlamjeftu", therefore grammatically getting the
#latter, but in the discussion, she wasn't sure this was intentional, and
#agreed that she wanted the "pe".

#If this isn't clear, then suppose that the tournament was an ongoing
#thing lasting many weeks and possibly including the entirety of the
#events of this text (a bowling league can be thought of as just such an
#extended tournament).  In that case, "the week after" is saying when the
#pain occurred within the tournament, and not when the tournament
#occurred.  There is no way to tell which is the case based on the text -
#this text certainly shows why NLP researchers will have lots of fun
#dealing with English tenses.

#"pu ba" in this poi clause further compounds that messy capupu that
#Sylvia already had generated.  She is again doing a literal translation
#line by line.  In Lojban story time, once the bridi is set into the past
#with the first clause, all of these extra "pu"s are redundant and
#potentially confusing.  Nora probably corrected for this automatically,
#but I can easily envision a non-native English speaker getting lost in
#the relative tenses.

#There are only three times definitely relevant to this bridi - the
#speaker's time, the time two sessions ago, and the time of the
#disruption/tournament a week later.  Possibly a fourth, the earlier time
#implied by the pain "already" having started.  Thus, any more than 4
#tense words in the entire text is probably excessive.

#"bavlamjeftu" is a much used Virginia lujvo for "next week", hence it
#was translated correctly by Nora.  However, Sylvia already has the "ba"
#expressed in the "pu ba" earlier in the clause, so the "bav" is
#redundant.  I might even have jumped to the conclusion that "next week"
#is relative to the speaker time without all the "pu"s that keep pushing
#things back into the past.

#I suggest:
#"poi dicra le grinunjvi pe ca le ba lamjeftu"
#"which interrupts the tournament that occurs in the future adjacent-week.

#Given the meaning of "dicra", no tu'a was needed on "grinunjvi", which
#is already by its internal construction, an event abstraction.  The use
#of the "tu'a" may have been the subtle clue that told Nora that the
#tournament suffered a disruptive rather than a disrupting/interrupting
#occurrance.

#8. My resulting text is thus:

#.i ca'o le pu da'amoi ke bolgu'o nunkei poi terkansa le mi pendo ku'o mi
#co'a lifri lenu cortu le mi zagylamtu'e kei poi dicra le grinunjvi pe ca
#le ba lamyjeftu

#Back-translating (I hope):

#During the previous penultimate ball-rolling-game which was accompanied in
#by my friend(s), I started-to-experience the event of pain in my thigh that
#interrupted the tournament that happened in the following adjacent-week.


Nora retaliated with:

In the next-to-last bowling game I played with my friend, my thigh
started to hurt, which disrupted the bowling-team competition the
following week.

pals->friend is understandable; I wouldn't be too fussed about number.
Also, the pluperfect was lost: I'm not sure to what extent Sylvia unhinged
the "already had" (to my mind, she hadn't at all), but Nora killed it off.
Otherwise A-OK. I wonder, though, how Nora took {dicra} as disrupt,
rather than interrupt? Well, disrupt *can* be interrupt, I suppose...


#Whether Nick is fussed about number, the ground rules of this games are
#quite unclear.  Is the goal to get succeeding people to recreate as
#close to the original meaning of the English as possible?  If the goal
#is a lack of information loss, then anything that is an explicit clue to
#gender or number in the English should be preserved, probably
#formulaically.  Certainly I would do so in writing a machine translator.

#I've already said that the tenses were so elaborate as to be meaningless
#or even erroneous, other than as semantic clues to push a particular
#English wording in back-translation.  Colloquial Lojban should typically
#use many fewer tensed constructions than corresponding English.

#If on the other had, the goal is to see what kind of information losses
#occur in expressing things in a 'natural Lojban style', then I would
#expect some significant chunks of info to be lost in the first
#translation that would never be regained, but would hope that later
#exchanges do not lose any additional information.  If this is the goal,
#the that first translator (only) should also be sending to the moderator
#an intended >colloquial English< back-translation so that it is more
#clear what information was expected to be lost to later exchanges.

#Nora's approach to this game would then make more sense.  She sets the
#goal for any given text to translate it into >colloquial< text of the
#other language.  Some Lojban-to-English efforts in previous rounds of
#this game were afflicted by stilted word-for-word Lojbanized English
#that make it very clear what the Lojban was, but make the effort less of
#a "game".  This round seems to have gone differently, but the ground
#rule should be clear, and the evaluations should be consistent with
#the ground rules.

I'm hesitant to set any ground rules at all, because the point of the
game, as I see it, is how communiactive *undoctored* Lojban is (and, on
the way, to help make the language more expressive by ferreting out
solutions to the expressiveness problem). But I really do want the game
to be as chaotic as possible: *all* information loss is instructive.


#Because Nora went for colloquialism in here English, she rephrased
#Sylvia's "I initiated the experience of pain in my thigh" to "my thigh
#started to hurt".  This colloquial expression meant that there was no
#event clause for the "poi dicra ..." clause to modify restrictively.
#The net result was a comma, and that the rest of her English was clearly
#NON-restrictive.  This error led to Mark splitting the text into two
#sentences, and the loss of tense information made sure that any hope of
#the contextual semantics holding the meaning of "dicra" were thoroughly
#lost.  (I do note that "dicra" is accidentally cognate to "disrupt", and
#this may have also been an unconscious factor in its selection.)  The
#significance of the week as a time between events was more easily lost
#when the two clauses were split.

#I've teased Nora mercilessly on this, because one of her favorite
#criticisms of me is that I make mistakes on restrictive vs.
#non-restrictive in translating into Lojban.  Thus, when she misses a
#very important restrictive distinction, turnabout is fair play.

#Still, Nora would not have missed it if she hadn't been, perhaps
#excessively, trying to go to colloquial English.

Well, as long as it makes the game chaotic and anarchic, I'm not fussed :)

Mark wasn't that sure:

ca le da'amoi nu mi jo'u lemi pendo cu kelcrboli kelci kei le gapru ke
tuple pagbu po'e mi co'a se cortu
.i lenu go'i cu dicra le kelcrboli,iykelci girzu nunjvi pe le bavlamji
jeftu

Nicer sentence structure than Sylvia's (chopped in two).

#But chopped in two was wrong, as I've noted, since it meant that the
#restriction was lost.  Most likely, when the English is one sentence,
#the Lojban should probably also be, unless it is broken into carefully
#logically and causally connected pieces.  Else something may be lost, as
#it was.
#
#Also, the "lenu go'i" compounds the problem.  This says that my thigh
#>starting< to hurt 2 weeks ago was what disrupted the tournament.

{da'amoi} is fine. Top marks for {jo'u}, though maybe even {joi} would be
better?

#I don't think so, and I think the original "kansa" was better still.
#"joi" is intended to form a mass, and the logic of masses, especially
#mixed ones is very unintuitive.  English 'and' seems ever more and more
#to be equivalent to "jo'u" more often than any other.

No lujvo for
thigh, I see. I prefer this tanru (upper leg part) to Sylvia's (next-to-
buttocks-leg), but neither is essentially bad. The le'avla into lujvo
issue gave Mark some pause - as he said, {zei} (which would allow {kelcrboli
zei kelci} is not official yet. But that le'avla! Mark, tut tut. Why, I hear
you ask? Because Ivan ignored the reservations Mark included in his
accompanying letter, and came up with:

The last but one when my friends and I were playing ball, the upper
part of my leg started aching.  So the ball team competitions had to
stop for a week.

Crunch.
OK, lesson one is that you keep the final consonants in your le'avla:
kelcrbolinge.
Lesson two is that {dicra} is vague. One interrupts (or disrupts) a
single game, which is what was intended (the tournament was disrupted).
Can one interrupt a sequence of such games? Apparently. If so, how can
you tell which you're disrupting?
My verdict is that a {nunjvi} is a single game, and continual games are
something other than a {nunjvi}, so I shift the blame to Ivan. But I'm not
100% sure. Would {pu'e jivna} vs. {zu'o jivna} do the trick here?

#"nunjvi" could either me a single match or a series of them.  If "dicra"
#had been the right word, it indeed what have been vague as to whether a
#single game was broken off, or whether there was a gap between games.
#The use of "porsi" would have clearly indicated sequence:  "dicra le
#porsi" would not mean that a single game was interrupted.  I think the
#problem was the lujvo.  Tournament to me is more than merely an event of
#competition, it is system/systematic competition, and "porsi" or better
#"ciste" would have enriched the metaphor.

Going back to Mark's text though...

.i lenu go'i cu dicra le kelcrboli,iykelci girzu nunjvi pe le bavlamji
jeftu

This interrupted the bowling-game group {nunjvi} to do with the next week.

My default interpretation is that, the nunjvi having been restricted to
a particular week, we are talking about a particular game, not a sequence
of games, being interrupted after all. Ivan's interpretation would make
more sense to me if the text read {ca'o le bavlamji jetfu}, which qualifies
the whole bridi and not just the {nunjvi} sumti.

#Ivan also missed a restrictive marker, in this case "pe".  Hence he did
#not see that the "following week" was identifying the tournament, and
#not defining a duration. [] Nora's was just as severe in its effects, and made
#this one possible, I think.

#Somehow in here, "dicra" slipped over into "denpa".

Colin rounded things off with:

ca le da'amoi bele'ipunu lemi pendo joi mi cu bolkei ku
lemi tulga'u co'a cortu .iseki'ubo le bolgirjvi co'u.ei fasnu ji'e pa jeftu

and added:

]I'm not happy with "da'amoi" for "The last but one time" (though I have
]a strong guess that that was what was in the previous version). I at
]least made it "da'amoi le'ipu".

I believe Colin is objecting to the ordering of the ball-playing events being
necessarily defated into temporal. The proper place to explicitly state
the ordering principle is the x3 of {moi}, but I really doubt {da'amoi befi
leka temci purci beife le'inu bolkei} is necessary. {temci da'amoi} or
{kazypurci da'amoi} would do the trick, but Colin's resolution is probably the
best.

]I don't think much of "ball team competitions" - that looks much too
]literal for me; ditto "upper part of my leg". Only guessing what Ivan
]had to work with, I would have Englished it with "my thigh" and "the
]ball games" or something.

]I'm not at all sure about my "ji'e pa jeftu" - I've just thought that
]"ji'e pa mu'o jeftu" would be better. I'm looking forward to seeing what
]that is Englished from.


{ji'e} is certainly not the right BAI for the job, its meaning being
explicitly non-temporal. If we interpret it as the state of interruption
being limited to one week, then the translation is still reasonable, if
ellpitic.

Of course, that should have been {nu bolkeijvi}.

We thus started with:

The second last time I went bowling with my pals, I'd already started getting
those pains in my thigh that were to prove so disruptive in the tournament the
week after...

and finished up with:

At the second last of the previous times my friend(s) and I played a ball game,
my leg-top started hurting. For that reason the ball-group-competator had to
stop happening (this was limited by one week).

If you've survived this far, comments are certes welcome.

---
'Dera me xhama t"e larm"e,	       T  Nick Nicholas, EE & CS, Melbourne Uni
 Dera mbas blerimit		       |         Mail: nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au
 Me xhama t"e larm"e!		       | "Omiloume ellhnika/Esperanto parolata/
 Lumtunia nuk ka ngjyra tjera.'	       |  {mika'e tavla baula lojban.je'uru'e}
 - Martin Camaj, _Nj"e Shp'i e Vetme_  |      (Better .sig suggestions welcome)