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    • Specifying natural language ambiguity in Lojban translation?

    Posted by baisong on Fri 18 of Dec, 2009 14:06 GMT posts: 99 United States

    Is there a feature of lojban for this? For example, lets say I have three
    bad puns:

    pa What did the fish say when it hit a wall? Dam
    re The blind man picked up his hammer and saw.
    ci Why did the vampire snowman die? Frostbite

    Let's say we also had a comprehensive English -> Lojban dictionary that
    could recognize (1) homophones, (2) multiple word senses and (3) possible
    novel compounds. If we then also had some sort of meta-markup that could tag
    one or more lojban tokens as correlating to an English word or sound, these
    types of plays on words could be described.

    If there isn't part of the language that does it already, here's what I
    imagine it looking like functionally:

    { .i zo'e zo'e <?lang:en lemma="dam" sampa="d{m"?> zo'e zo'e }

    And then, if you tag alot of english terms for lojban words, this program
    could automatically hold IM conversations for me because I normally just
    intentionally misinterpret things and make bad puns out of them. It's gold.

    You could also potentially describe more complex ailments of natural
    language like connotations and misspellings. Maybe it could also be used
    (down the line) to automatically explain bad buns or political buzzwords to
    people who don't speak the language the pun/propaganda is written in.

    mi'e ku'us .i fa'o

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    Posted by PierreAbbat on Fri 18 of Dec, 2009 14:54 GMT posts: 324

    On Friday 18 December 2009 09:02:39 Oren wrote:
    > Is there a feature of lojban for this? For example, lets say I have three
    > bad puns:
    >
    > pa What did the fish say when it hit a wall? Dam
    > re The blind man picked up his hammer and saw.
    > ci Why did the vampire snowman die? Frostbite
    >
    > Let's say we also had a comprehensive English -> Lojban dictionary that
    > could recognize (1) homophones, (2) multiple word senses and (3) possible
    > novel compounds. If we then also had some sort of meta-markup that could
    > tag one or more lojban tokens as correlating to an English word or sound,
    > these types of plays on words could be described.
    >
    > If there isn't part of the language that does it already, here's what I
    > imagine it looking like functionally:
    >
    > { .i zo'e zo'e <?lang:en lemma="dam" sampa="d{m"?> zo'e zo'e }

    If I understand you right, you can do this with a type-1 fu'ivla: "me la'o gy.
    dam .gy". But I'd rather make puns in Lojban than try to translate English
    puns, just as if I'm speaking French or Spanish, I make up puns in those
    languages. L'aveugle traverse la route et la voie. The difference in Lojban
    is that it doesn't have, except in cmene, two identical-sounding words with
    completely different meanings, and it doesn't have two words spelled the
    same, such as "axes", which are pronounced differently. But there are words
    that sound similar but have different meanings (in Alice, I often
    confused "noltruni'u", the Queen, and "noltroni'u", the Duchess). Speaking of
    axes:
    lu li'o le nu le terdi cu carna le jendu cu cacra li revo li'u
    i lu lo'e nu catra zo'u sei la noltroni'u cu cusku ko vimcu le stedu ti li'u

    mu'omi'e .pier.

    --
    When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates.
    Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.


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