Inflections and slang words

[azuriss]

How do inflections of the voice affect the meaning of a lojban sentence? And how would you express slang words?

[selpa'i]

Am 04.07.2012 02:21, schrieb azuriss:
> How do inflections of the voice affect the meaning of a lojban

> sentence? And how would you express slang words? --
Strictly speaking, intonation must not carry any meaning by itself or
you lose the 100% mapping between speech and writing.
In informal contexts, however, I'm sure many people would ignore this
and intonate as much as they want to add nuances.

Slang words are much less common in Lojban. You would have to give some
examples of what sort of slang words you are talking about.

mu'o

--
.i pau mi me ma .i pa mai ko mi jungau la'e di'u
.i ba bo mi va'o lo nu nelci lo nu me ma kau cu barkla
.i va'o lo nu na nelci cu denpa ti lo nu mi drata

[Lindar]

If you'd like to provide a great big list of expressions I can attempt to translate them.

Problem is, a lot of slang relies on cultural knowledge, which doesn't really work in Lojban.

"The bee's knees." makes no sense in Lojban, for example.

[azuriss]

What about older terms like "fresh" or "funky"? :) My dad came up with those because he doesn't really see how a language could work without slang.

[Jacob Errington]

Lojban works fine as it is without slang...
The only slang I can think of are intentional word-for-word
translations of natlang expressions, which are hilarious in Lojban,
because it gets at the true interpretation. Other than that, there's
intentional misuse of certain words, like {je'a} which I (and some
others) use alone to mean something like a cross between {ie} and
{go'i}.

mu'o mi'e la tsani

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[Cal Stepanian]

Jacob, could you give an example of what you are referring to? It sounds amusing, and it doesn't look like I can find such things by Google.

[Jacob Errington]

Take my word for it, it's hilarious.

{ko lebna lo mi valsi seva'uku}

;) mu'o mi'e la tsani

[Lindar]

What about older terms like "fresh" or "funky"? :) My dad came up with those because he doesn't really see how a language could work without slang.

{zanru} and {selmanci} or {zgiselmanci} specifically for music.

There are plenty of weird words that we have that don't map to English if you're looking for something like that. Like {ckavre} means like... reclining in bed. The problem with Lojban is that you can't really just assign an arbitrary new meaning to a word or add implication to a word. That's not part of the language. We have weird words that don't map to English perfectly and we have some silly addages/phrases/words like {.i ko'a muvdu .ije le drata ku klama fu zi'o}, which is like "Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.", but doesn't actually say that.

So... no, we don't have words for "rock n' roll" or "funky" or "bitchin'", but neither does Japanese or Chinese or Arabic. >_>

[MorphemeAddict]

All these languages have ways of saying "rock 'n roll", although Japanese borrowed it from English. "Funky" and "bitchin'" are indeed slang, and I wonder what a non-slang 'translation' into English would be for them. 

stevo 

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[.arpis.]

Isn't that exactly what {fu'ivla} are for?

Isn't there even an example talking about using {fu'ivla} to coin words for "rock" (as in music) and "rock n roll"? (L4B, I tink)

--
mu'o mi'e .arpis.