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Lost In Translation

... in no way related to my continued adventures in CDDA that involved me arriving back at my base at 3AM with a deer I had accidentally run over and no headlights on account of none surviving the return trip directly through the acid ants ...


So one cannot simply say "hold my beer" in lojban. Well, I guess you could, but that would imply you would be holding the beer, probably in your cupped hands. Gross. We have technology for this! Bottles, mugs, her teacups, the skulls of your enemies, flower pots, etc. Anyways. Beer. What you are actually holding is, usually, a container that contains the beer, a point that English kind of negligently glosses over--hold my beer. Probably because you are in a hurry to do something stupid, and if you took a long time to say it, you might think better of it, or more likely you will have forgotten by the time you got done expositing. Ent wisdom, yo.


Over in lojbanistan one could handwave things with tu'a, which "extracts a concrete sumti from an unspecified abstraction; equivalent to le nu/su'u [sumti] co'e". Probably you don't want to learn tu'a from the dictionary.


> ko jgari tu'a le mi birje

make-it-true-that-you hold some-abstraction-involving my beer


More specific would be to involve a specific container in some way associated with beer. We can also scoot the "me" to the end of the sentence, maybe to emphasize it more.


> ko jgari le birjybo'i pe mi

make-true hold the beer-bottle mine


You can also add some tea (that's a pronunciation hint) to reduce the me, and thus be a bit less egotistical. This seems not ideal for someone with a swollen ego about to do something stupid, but there is room for variance in translation, or "versions" as Borges is rumored to have termed them.


> ko jgari le ti birje kabri

make-true hold this-here beer cup


If you are shoving the bottle or whatever at them in the process of speaking one might shorten things to


> ko jgari ti

hold this!


but that lacks the important "there has been drinking going on" aspect. A good actor could make this work.


Speaking of Borges, "El idioma analĂ­tico de John Wilkins" features translation variance between the different Englishes one may find.


    ? -n skull
    skull - head bones - sedbo'u (lujvo)
    skull - sedbo'u (lujvo)
    ? sedbo'u
    sedbo'u (lujvo) stedu bongu
      $s_1=b_1$ is the skull of body $s_2=b_3$, performing function $b_2$
      GLOSS cranium (head bones), skull
      RAFSI sed bo'u

Huh, there's a "performing function" slot for bones. I guess one could abuse that and construct


> le bradi sedbo'u be fi le birje vasru

the enemy skull with-function beer container


a phrase which may serve you well if you ever find yourself in a camp of lojban-speaking beer-drinking skull-happy barbarians.


P.S. being able to flip the statement around to a would-be beer-loaner may also be important--perhaps they are equivocating, and you wish to egg them on. Season with zo'o to taste.


> xu do djica lenu mi jgari le se pinxe be do

Do you want me to hold your drink?


> .e'u mi jgari ta

[suggestion] I hold that


P.P.S. Idiomdrottning goes in for:


> mi ba gasnu

I future bring about (something unstated)


> zo'o mi ba gasnu

Heh, I'm gonna...


In English we "know by cultural means" (ka'u) what the ritual of the holding of the beer means, while lojban is, in theory, culturally neutral. (Lojban has internet nerd culture--see besto, sofybakni, the several XKCD.) Body language is also important, well beyond what limited encoding lojban has done by way of attitudinals.


ba could be in the far future; a good modification may be to qualify the future event as "soon", to or use the inchoative:


> mi bazi gasnu

> mi pu'o gasnu


tags #lojban #yolo

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