Why Translating In Lojban Is Enjoyable

[nemorathwald]

Watching netmouse put together a jigsaw puzzle at brendand's birthday party got me thinking along lines that caused me to realize why translating into Lojban can be so satisfying. Each new sentence is like a puzzle or riddle that one might find in the pages of a games magazine. Natural language grammars are filled with exceptions for little or no reasons, but the grammar of Lojban is as regular and immutable as a series of physical puzzle pieces that can be counted on to plug into each other in predictable ways. The language is so alien that it requires unpacking a natural language utterance into the underlying structural meaning like a disentanglement puzzle so that it can be completely re-packaged like a Soma cube or Tangram mechanical puzzle. Take, for instance, the sentence, "Only another breath will I breathe in this still air," from my current project to translate Kahlil Gibran's globally famous inspirational novella "The Prophet."

A root word, called a {gismu}, when used for the core word of the sentence, is a gizmo that has a bunch of sockets to plug other words into. {vasxu}, when used for the core word, gives the sentence the word order "breather: x1 breathes or respirates in atmosphere: x2." {mi} means "I" or "me" which will plug into the x1 socket before {vasxu}.
{mi vasxu} "I breathe."
Another {gismu} is {krefu} "recur", which I can attach to {vasxu} to form a compound {gismu}: {krefu vasxu} "recurrence-type-of-breathe." A compound phrase of this type keeps all the sockets of the last word, so the place structure of the sentence doesn't change.
{mi krefu vasxu} "I repeatedly breathe."
{smaji} means "still or quiet" and {vacri} means "air." Putting them next to each other makes them another compound phrase meaning "still-type-of-air." In order to avoid these {gismu} expressing their own sockets and being their own sentence, I put an adapter on them that packs them up and allows them to plug into a socket of the core word of the sentence. In this case, the adapter is {levi} which means "this." The phrase {levi smaji vacri} plugs into the x2 socket after {vasxu}.
{mi krefu vasxu levi smaji vacri} "I repeatedly breathe this still air."
Tacking {ba} to the front of {vasxu} gives it the future tense.
{mi ba krefu vasxu levi smaji vacri} "I will repeatedly breathe this still air."
So far it's a textbook case, but the sentence is still incomplete, and here is where I start to have a puzzle. My first attempt is to combine {pa} "one" with {roi} "ordinal tense" to get {paroi} "once."
{mi ba paroi krefu vasxu levi smaji vacri} "I will once repeat breathing this still air."
But the Prophet wasn't just expressing a number, he was expressing that there is a limit to how many times. {vasxu} offers no more sockets in the sentence. Like jigsaw puzzle pieces, number words like {za'unai pa} "not greater than one" just don't seem to fit anywhere.
There's more than one way to say anything in Lojban, but as I tried various means, I found them all clumsy. I'll try a custom socket. For this I need a type of adapter called a modal. The modal {ji'e} adds a new socket "up to limit:". This is a rarely-used tool in the toolbox, and not one that occurs to everyone, but serves surprisingly well here.
{ji'e li pa mi ba krefu vasxu levi smaji vacri} "up to limit: one, I will repeatedly breathe this still air."
Perhaps I could plug an entire phrase into the socket created by {ji'e}. Since the Prophet's English statement mentions "breath" twice, I can match this by moving {krefu vasxu} here and just leaving the core word of the sentence as {vasxu} "breathe." After many more steps of tweaking, I ended up with this:
{ji'e lo paroi krefu nu vasxu kei mi ba vasxu levi smaji vacri} "up to limit: once recurring breath, I will breathe this still air."
One solution to this puzzle has been found. A translation worthy of Daniel Jackson? You decide.