Re: Carl Burke's question

[Carl Burke <cburke@MITRE.ORG>]

At 05:37 AM 12/6/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Here is what Carl posted back in October.  <aybe someone will answer him
>now.  i could not even find a posted answer, though Carl says he got one.

Not posted, just mailed.

[BITE ME, IT'S FUN]
...
>In my case, I have littel to contribute to the discussion since I have
>never watched mst3k, do not know who or what Crow T. Robot is, or what
>s/he/it means by ""Bite me, it's fun!".

All of which would tend to make it hard to translate...

> ... knowing that "Bite me" has at least
>one figurative usage that has little necessarily to to with batci.  It is
>possible that the proer translation of this is solely attitudinal, or that
>it simply is untranslateable in brief because it relies on the polysemy of
>English.
>
>So carl, if you want help trying to translate it, you probably need to
explain
>what it means, and why these words are "immortal" %^)

Polysemy?  I suppose, since it does depend on a bundle of meanings rather
than relatively pure meanings.  It exploits multiple connotations attached
to the action of (someone) biting (something), and usage varies by
context, so I suppose that makes it polysemous.

The problem is to capture all of the essential meanings within a terse phrase,
some of which are attitudinal but many of which are not.  In context, it is
deliberately unclear whether the meaning is [(scorn!) I enjoy X and shall
ignore your opinion] or [(Huzzah!) Take a chunk out of me!] or [Eat me, you'll
like it!].

Mmmmm... I'll stick with what I've got and let the cultural context carry the
majority of the burden.  Takes too long to explain, or even to sum up, and
the phrase itself is too long as it is.  Mainly I was going for surface
translation, so my questions relate to 'is nu most appropriate?' and 'what's
the boundary between kukte and zdile?'.  Leaving the enjoyer unspecified seems
to cover most of the rest of the semantic waterfront, and specifying any
attitudinals would remove too much essential ambiguity.

(Whether it succeeded as a translation or not, at least it got an Esperantist
on the MST newsgroup to admit that Loglan/lojban is the only conlang that
threatens the manhood of Esperantists.  :)  So, _something_ was communicated.)

--
Carl Burke
cburke@mitre.orgFrom LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Mon Dec  8 16:48:41 1997
        for <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 16:48:35 -0500 (EST)
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la .and. cusku di'e

> p.s. I got an A in my Chemistry O level. My teacher predicted
> I'd fail, but I memorized stuff about Bessemer Converters,
> Vanadium IV Pentoxide, and something that involved the sequence
> "Potassium, Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, Aluminium, Zinc, Iron,
> Lead, Silver, Gold". Fuck knows what that was all about.

Reminds me of the alien in Hal Clement's sf novel _Iceworld_,
chanting "Gold--Tofacco!  Gold--Tofacco!  Gold--Tofacco!" without
knowing what the hell he's saying.  (What he *wants* is to trade his
gold for the Earthling's tobacco, but he can't manage labial
stops.)

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban