Phone game: TV

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

>Mark's starting sentence was:

>Until you start sitting up straight and stop playing with your food, young
>man, there'll be no television for you --- that's for sure!

>He handled this as:

>pu'o le mu'e do co'a xagysirji zutse gi'e na'e kelci le do sanmi doi citno
>nanmu kei .i'enairo'a do cu .e'anai catlu le se tivni vau ju'o

Yeah, that {e'anai} caused many problems in the TV sentence.  I'll concede
that what I wound up saying was probably not the right way to convey the
meaning, but it's interesting to look at why I did.

I had {do cu .e'anai catlu le se tivni} for "There'll be no TV for you."
This led Ivan to get "here you are watching TV."  I had been thinking along
the lines of Lojban's non-tensed nature; so {do catlu} means "you are a
watcher" -- not necessarily at this instant, or even in actual fact yet,
as in the "ducks are floaters" discussion I saw on here a while back.
The UI would then modify it to "you are a watcher (forbidden!)" or
something like "you are a watcher without permission," thus "you are
forbidden from being a watcher" (or more accurately "your being a watcher
is forbidden"), without implying necessarily that the watching is actually
takiing place.  There could probably be much better placements for the UI
to get that meaning across, and a {da'i} would not go amiss at all, but I
think you can see where I was coming from.

So, Nick, you think that a UI cannot negate a bridi?  OK, I'll accept that;
I couldn't tell if it could or couldn't myself.  But it need not have to in
order to use {.e'anai} as I did; not necessarily.

As to whether {pu'o} is the right word or not, perhaps causal links would
have been better, but I'm not sure they're critical.  The English had no
causality (though it relied on implied post hoc reasoning).  I was thinking
very much along the lines of the original sentence:  "In the time before
you start sitting up and not playing with your food, you're a forbidden
watcher of the TV."  You don't really need the causality; I don't think
it's cultural bias to allow this kind of implication.

~mark