Re: Translation Exercise (from ConLang)

["Jorge J. Llambías" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

 >I meant "morally good".

That's {vrude}.

>Well, "vi lo gugypau" was a mistake.  As I understand the gerna
>I've adding a new, ad hoc place to "xabju".  What I intended was
>to have "this gugypau" as the x2 of "xabju"; I wanted to put
>"lovi gugypau" (remembered from Loglan?) but I couldn't convince
>myself that it was grammatical.  Then I got sidetracked...

You did add a new place, but I think that still makes sense:
(I live somewhere) which occurs in this part of the country.

>I'm never too sure about "le" and "lo"!  Again, I may be
>remembering too much from Loglan but I tend to understand "le X"
>as "the thing I'm going to refer to as X" and end up treating
>"le" as En "the" and "lo" as En "a".

Whenever there's negation involved you should be careful with
{lo}. It usually means something different than what you'd expect
from a quick English gloss, because negation in English
usually has a more restricted scope than Lojban {na}.

>To my mind, I should have said "lo sicni be..." and "lo[i] cmalu
>vamji sicni" because the guy's offering a real 2-lobru'u coin in
>exchange for real small change.  He doesn't want things merely
>described as coins.

Yes, {lo sicni be fi lo lobru'u be li re} and {loi cmalu vamji sicni}
don't cause problems. You still need {loi} if you are thinking
of a single exchange.

[I'm not sure that {cmalu} is only for small in size. The gi'uste seems
to allow x2 to be any property. Maybe we should ask Lojban what
he intended :) How would we talk of little value other than with
cmalu?]

>I'm not sure about "le/lo gugypau": in this
>context a thing he's going to refer to as a country-part is
>probably fine!
>
>I'm a bit confused about how "na ta'e xabju" ends up meaning
>that he has no fixed abode.

Because {na} has scope over the whole bridi. So you are saying:
"It is not the case that there is a place such that I typically live
there", but what you mean is "there is a place (namely this place)
such that it is not the case that I live there." For the last sentence
you need the scope of {lo gugypau} wider than the negation.
You could say, for example:

        mi lo gugypau naku ta'e xabju
        There is a country part such that I don't typically live there.

but if you use {na} instead, it doesn't work.

co'o mi'e xorxes