Padraic Brown <elemtilas@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>><They don't have a word for "s****ts" -- reflecting the geekiness of
>><people who are attracted to lojban -- look at your local TV newscast
>><or newspaper to verify that "s****ts" is a prime concept -- what other
>><gaps exist in their semantic web due to their _extreme_ nerdiness?
>><
>><Never forget the cartoon at http://xkcd.com/191/
-- lojbanists are so
>><geeky that even most geeks won't have anything to do with them. Drink
>><their kool-aid at your own risk.
>
>And you think _that_ is hostile?
Yes. While I can wear the label "geek" with some amount of pride
myself, as a general claim about Lojbanists it is insulting.
>>When I do work on Lojban, I tend to want to work on my translation of
>>part of Burton's Arabian Nights,
>
>A noble project indeed!
Would that I could stick with it long enough to get somewhere.
>>not on ad hoc "how do you say it"
>>problems that start with the fallacious premise that a speaker of
>>another language would want to say exactly what an English speaker
>>says.
>
>Well, then, please excuse us for wasting your ever so precious time!
>By all means, please return to your great work and don't even bother
>with such requests!
It isn't that my time is so valuable, since I waste it on lots of
other things. But I seldom get any enjoyment out of ad-hoc
translation exercises, and it takes abnormal care to craft a
translation in such a way that it teaches rather than begs the
question.
>It should be noted, if you'd acquiesed to the original request, rather
>than waste time and bandwidth on false complaints of there being "no
>context" and that speakers of another language would even want to say
>"exactly what an English speaker says".
I was arguing what is to me a fundamental point about language.
>>>You won't find yourself flubbing around when asked for a simple piece
of Lojban!
>>
>>Perhaps some things aren't so "simple".
>
>Kind of destroys one of Lojban's design goals, then.
No. Just a strawman about Lojban's design goals.
>You should remove
>"Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn."
>from the language's main page.
Lojban IS simple compared to natural languages, and it IS easy to
learn. Natural languages are immensely more complicated, and the
hardest part of learning Lojban is memorizing a sufficient percentage
of the roots, which at 1300 or so with a couple hundred of those not
especially useful is smaller than any natural language that I know (it
takes around 1200 words to achieve merely first year competency in
Russian, which is pretty weak competence, and it takes several years
to master fine points of word order, grammar and semantics, not to
mention idiom)
>>One of my points in this
>>discussion is that there is a LOT of hidden meaning in the "simple
>>phrase" cultural baggage that other culture/languages would either
>>have to ignore, or would have to make explicit.
>
>Any baggage you feel en***bered by is what you've brought with you. I
>don't really care about all the baggage or the cultural wossnames. I
>am reasonably certain that we share some of the same cultural baggage
>-- your group is based not too far from here, so the whole notion
>about "hidden meanings" and "cultrual baggage" and the rest is really
>quite ridiculous.
>
>As the chief architect of the Lojban language, it really should not be
>at all difficult to communicate a simple sentence in the language you
>created (albeit with much help from others), which is designed to be
>"simple...easy to learn" within a shared cultural milieu to someone
>who is interested in your language.
Lojban rejects that shared cultural milieu. Indeed, to making use of
a parochial cultural milieu already is associated with a derogatory
label. That isn't talking Lojban, but talking "encoded English".
>If you don't want people asking, why promote your language at all?
I like people asking the right questions.
>>>>a) they lack context
>>>
>>>They _do_ have context, so you're quite wrong there.
>>
>>They lack explicit *linguistic* context, which means that a
>>translation must either ignore what has been omitted, leading to a
>>poor translation, or it must make that context explicit, leading to a
>>wordy, often confusing translation which still might not be correct
>>because the assumptions made about the context might be incorrect.
>
>Indeed, there are always issues that make for humorous translations.
>Usually, this only happens during a translation relay where people try
>to translate from one conlang into another. Generally, when
>translating from one's mother language to one's own conlang, these
>problems resolve themselves quite seamlessly. This is because the
>translator/creator _knows_ the linguistic context of his mother
>language and also of his own conlang.
Lojban has no "linguistic context" per se, and rejects those of the
source languages.
>>How many different answers did I get to the question of what "s****ts"
>>means (in the phrase)?
>
>You got several -- but mostly those answers involved miniscule details
>such as whether or not "chess" should be counted.
But those detail affect how the word "s****ts" should be translated.
Since we cannot agree what the English word means (and the radio
announcer scenario does not in fact resolve it, since we don't know
what the announcer considers to be s****ts, and how it differs from
"news" even while being differentiated from it in usage.
>Few of the answers
>really dealt with the actual nature of _s****ts_. Probably because it
>is assumed that most of the respondents and readers of the group have
>an understanding of what "s****ts" is.
I don't. I've debated that particular concept for some 30 years now,
far longer than I've been involved in any sort of language project (In
college, I often debated with a good friend as to what constituted
"games", "s****ts", "play" and we never reached any satisfactory
answers.
>Yes, it is "cultural baggage",
>but as such it can safely be ignored for the purposes of the
>translation excercise, reason being, we all share in the same baggage!
If we rely on that, then the Lojban is not Lojban but encoded English.
>>I do not know what a radio announcer means by
>>"s****ts" in that phrase,
>
>Again, you're being a prat. He means "anything at all noteworthy about
>the people and activities that fall under the umbrella term called
>'s****ts'". I'd suggest a good English dictionary and perhaps have a
>shufty at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S****ts>
to round out this
>deficit in your cultural attache case.
which itself gives several contradictory definitions.
In Lojban, polysemy is not considered a good thing.
>>and there are numerous Lojban words, all of
>>which might be correct or incorrect depending on that hidden context
>>of what the announcer really means.
>
>There is no hidden context at all.
Would the announcer include a chess match under s****ts, or not? (The
word I chose in my translation assumes that he would. If he does not
consider s****ts to include chess, then that is not the correct word.)
lojbab
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