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[lojban-beginners] Re: Connecting clauses and serial verbs: How best to translate "Come and take them"





Em sexta-feira, 16 de fevereiro de 2018 22:24:50 UTC+3, volcpitar escreveu:

To take a concrete example, how could you translate μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé) (Come and take them!), the Spartans’ famous response to the Persians’ demand to lay down their arms and surrender at the battle of Thermopylae?



μολὼν is an Ancient Greek aorist active participle.
I'm afraid Ancient Greek aorist is poorly translated into English. One just need to study Ancient Greek to get a grasp of what aorist means there. Aorist, perfective, telic are infamous examples of "you can't do that in English" and a frequent source of confusion for English-speaking Lojbanists (as if we had other kinds of them).

The best renderings in Lojban I can come up with are

[from more precise to less and less correct]

{me lo poi mo'u klama vau lebna fa ko} (participle retained, {mo'u} is chosen to render telicity, see this)
{klama be co'i lebna fa ko} (participle simplified into a seltau, aspect changed from achievative to perfective)
{ca le nu vo'a co'i klama vau ko lebna} (participle transformed into an adverbial clause)
{ko co'i klama gi'e lebna} (participle moved into a separate main verb)

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