"The beautiful little dancer" in Lojban

[Yannis Haralambous]

dear Lojban speakers,

I'm writing a book on Natural Language Processing, in which I frequently refer to Lojban.

At some point I'm comparing the number of morphological markers in various languages: I take the sentence “The beautiful little dancer” (meaning a female dancer) and I count the feminine-specific morphemes, for example in French: l*a* be*lle* petit*e* danseu*se* (four non-empty morphemes), in German d*ie* schöne kleine Tänzer*in* (two morphemes), etc.

In order to give a Lojban example, could you please provide me with the sentence translated into Lojban, twice: first meaning a male dancer and then meaning a female dancer (if there are any differences).

Thank you very much in advance,

Seasons' greetings

Yannis

[gleki.is...@gmail.com]

le pa cmalu je melbi dansu - the small-and-beautiful dancer
le pa cmalu je melbi dansu - the small-and-beautiful dancer
le pa cmalu je melbi dansu noi ninmu - the small-and-beautiful dancer which is a woman
le pa cmalu je melbi dansu noi nanmu - the small-and-beautiful dancer which is a man

You may also use fetsi and nakni for biological traits.

[Mark E. Shoulson]

You can also work ninmu/nanmu or fetsi/nakni into the the description itself and not use a relative clause as gleki has done below.

See, the thing is, Lojban isn't like German and French and such.  There's no grammatical "gender" in the usual sense.  If you want to say something is male, *say* it's male.  If you want to say it's female, *say* it's female.  Same with number.  In the example below, gleki's translations say "the *one* small-and-beautiful dancer" (that's what "pa" means.)  Without "pa", it would almost surely be understood the same... unless the context made a plural understanding more likely.  Number isn't marked, nor is gender...  Nor is species, even.  If you need to specify the dancer is human, you'll have to say so.  (This isn't actually different than English, though.  Anakin Skywalker and Senator Palpatine were watching Mon Cala "dancers" while they discussed the health-care benefits of the Dark Side.)

I think you won't find the kind of markers you're looking for in Lojban, unless your range is broader than I'm understanding.

~mark

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[scope845h...@icebubble.org]

"Mark E. Shoulson" <ma...@kli.org> writes:

> You can also work ninmu/nanmu or fetsi/nakni into the the description
> itself and not use a relative clause as gleki has done below.

I agree with Mark. I'd probably go with something like:
{le pa cmalu je melbi je ninmu dansu} and
{le pa cmalu je melbi je nanmu dansu}.

But in real-life Lojban, "the beautiful little dancer" would most likely
occur with an antecedent, i.e.:

{pa lo ninmu cu sanli le tsina}
A woman stands on the stage.
{.i logo'i noi cmalu je melbi cu dansu}
[it/she], which/who is small and beautiful, dances.

In such usage, the gender is indicated upon first mention, with the
description referring to the gendered antecedent. It might be clearer
to examine the Lojban translation of "a beautiful little dancer."

[Yannis Haralambous]

Thank you for your many answers. So it seems I can write:

the gendered version

le melbi      ke cmalu ke nakni dansu
the beautiful (  small (  male  dancer)

le melbi      ke cmalu ke fetsi   dansu
the beautiful (  small (  female  dancer)

the gendered affix version

le melbi      ke cmalu nakydansu
the beautiful (  small male-dancer)

le melbi      ke cmalu fe'idansu
the beautiful (  small female-dancer)

But is there a semantic or pragmatic difference between "ke nakni dansu" and "nakydansu"?

What I mean is: under what circumstances would you choose the affixed rather than the non-affixed version?

Is is that using "ke nakni" would mean emphasizing on the gender?

 
I noticed that some of you use the particle je and others ke, what is the difference?

Thanks again,

Yannis

[gleki.is...@gmail.com]

Le jeudi 29 décembre 2022 à 11 h 17 min 45 s UTC+3, yanni...@gmail.com a écrit :

Thank you for your many answers. So it seems I can write:

the gendered version

le melbi      ke cmalu ke nakni dansu
the beautiful (  small (  male  dancer)

le melbi      ke cmalu ke fetsi   dansu
the beautiful (  small (  female  dancer)

the gendered affix version

le melbi      ke cmalu nakydansu
the beautiful (  small male-dancer)

le melbi      ke cmalu fe'idansu
the beautiful (  small female-dancer)

fe'irdansu (fe'idansu are two words)

But is there a semantic or pragmatic difference between "ke nakni dansu" and "nakydansu"?

lujvo can have meaning separate from their underlying tanru. E.g. {bramlatu} may mean "Big Cat" (lion, tiger etc.) as opposed to "big cat" which might be just {barda mlatu} or {lo mlatu poi barda}
 

What I mean is: under what circumstances would you choose the affixed rather than the non-affixed version?

Is is that using "ke nakni" would mean emphasizing on the gender?

 
I noticed that some of you use the particle je and others ke, what is the difference?

ke ... [ke'e] is a pair of brackets showing scope within tanru. Tanru by definition are vague entities so the logical AND operator je would be more precise.