Re: translation exercise

Mark J. Reed scripsit:

>         I know who I want to take me home.
>
> Maybe I've just been hypersensitized to complexity, and this is
> actually perfectly straightforward and transparent to non-natives, but
> it strikes me as the sort of thing that might present translation
> difficulties, and may not survive the operation as a single sentence.
This is an example of a so-called "indirect question", and it has vexed
and perplexed the Lojban community for many a year.  We eventually
added a patch to handle these things, but it is only a patch: we have
no properly logical analysis of them.

I asked Linguist List what the approaches of various natlangs are, and
basically got two kinds of answers: those that use explicit question
words, as here (and it is a question word, not a relative pronoun, as
other languages that make a sharp distinction make clear), and those
that blur the distinction between "I know who" and "I know the one that".

Two things the Lojbanists have found by experience: using "I" as the
subject makes reasoning more difficult, and a non-factive verb such as
"wonder" should be chosen rather than "know", as the latter drags in
issues of "wissen" vs. "kennen" and epistemology that are themselves
extremely confusing.

So I suggest this alternative sentence:

        John wonders who Mary wants to take her home.

This still preserves the original ambiguity: Mary's home or the third
party's?

--
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
        --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God"
                John Cowan <jcowan@...>

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