hamlet

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The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

nglish Original

(Note: By starting this, and conducting this psuedo-experiment, I am committing to taking care of the final editing/smoothing/etc, should the translation be finished. --Jay)


Please remember, if you don't like the idea of translating Hamlet, do not participate. Its that simple!

  • Agreed. And while I'm prepared to review what people contribute to Hamlet, I do not like the idea of translating Hamlet into Lojban, because I do not think Lojban is ready for it --- and, with respect, I think I should know. (Yes, what Hamlet is for me is what Alice is for pc.) If this Hamlet will not be metrical, I cannot in good conscience contribute to it. You guys go ahead --- and I hope you've got good marginal annotations in your editions, because I'll be merciless about mistranslations.But one more thing. To have the anonymous medium of the Wiki be the staging area for Hamlet is, IMAO, sheer lunacy. There is no accountability of who said what, no principled way of separating language from discussion, no way of keeping things straight, no readily accessible versioning. All this is what the CVS (and conventions like !TeXinfo on top of it) is for: [1] . If you're going to go ahead with this, please use the CVS instead. If things are to happen on the Wiki, rather than the mailing list or CVS, I am not prepared to be part of it, and I think you'll find it'll quickly become either unmanageable, or only one guy posting. The Wiki is an excellent hammer; but this is not a nail. cein, if you're not familiar with Robin's CVS, please become so. -- mi'e nitcion.
    • I haven't noticed anything happening quickly! You're right about only one guy participating though - this guy would like to have his Lojban commented on some time - are you happy with pentamtre for the rythm? -- Greg
    • I'm conducting a psuedo-experiment with this. If it does become unmangable in Wiki form, I'll handle moving it to CVS. I chose Hamlet because there is already some experience with translating it floating around (and, woohoo, that experience has said it will be merciless, alright!) and because I am familiar with Hamlet in a literature-analysis kind of way. (and, hey, i made this, not cein. ;) I do need to acquire a new annotated copy, however. --Jay
    • Well, OK, dude. I think this will be havoc and devastation, but again, the proof will be in the pudding. After all, I didn't think Alice would work either. Then again, without having read Alice, I still don't know it has. :-)
      • la'e di'u cu mutce cumki .iku'i na'e frili fa le nu cpacu le se djuno poi se vamji ku'o mi'e Jay Kominek jez

Hey! Klingon was good enough for Hamlet but Lojban isn't "yet"? How many more decades of work until Lojban is up to the standards set by Klingon?

  • In my opinion? Five years. -- nitcion, who just pulled that number out of a hat. But remember, Lojban sets itself far higher standards than Klingon. And in reality, Klingon in '94 wasn't ready -- yes, I still went ahead, but it wasn't ready. Klingon in '98, I think, was when it was ready. I am very happy there was a second edition of Hamlet in 2000.
  • Bear in mind that the languages have different goals and different kinds of development and started out with different amounts of "grounding." Klingon can play fast and loose with all sorts of logical meanings, as a pseudo-natural language. Business about ko'a co'a sisku le mamta be ko'a being wrong (and it is) would not cause a Klingon-speaker to hesitate a moment (no more than it does an English-speaker)... but it must be distinguished properly in Lojban. Lojban is building its meanings from the ground up, while Klingon can rely on fuzzy natural-language concepts like "noun" and "verb" (compare the fuss about how Esperanto claims to have only 16 rules of grammar compared to the hundreds in Lojban's YACC grammar, though Esperanto is far more complicated. But it can talk about nouns and verbs and preposition and subjects and objects and thus rely on preexisting concepts; Lojban has to invent and define its own terminology if it's to know what it means). -mi'e mark

Would this be middle English to modern lojban or to middle lojban ijyjbo? Or could we just use long tanru so that the rafsi don't enter into it?

(.i la maikl. po'o ka'e te preti di'u) There is limited precedent for doing things like someone contemporary translating the Divine Comedy into Middle instead of Modern German; the proper term for that, of course, is "curio". I know you're joking, but with the geekiness of our culture, I doubt something like this should even be mentioned --- precisely because someone's going to feel challenged to do it now. (And the last thing Lojban needs right now is a bunch of even more wrong rafsi.) -- nitcion.

Awww, c'mon, pwease? </sarcasm> One serious thought occurs to me. We have a version of both Thou (do) AND middle english you (do'o) in lojban! Yes, you used to be plural.

  • Yes, but. By the time of Hamlet, You corresponds to French Vous: it's a polite vs. intimate (Thou) pronoun. The scene where Hamlet talks to Gertrude before he kills Polonius ("Come come, Thou hast..." "Come come, you have...") exploits this --- and unfortunately, I had to skirt it in the Klingon, using honorifics instead. That means that do/do'o won't be what you're looking for in most cases, but rather .o'e/.io (.o'e/.o'enai would be the height of unsubtlety.)
  • And I must knee-jerk react to the implication that do is singular and do'o is plural. Say it again: Lojban pro-sumti are not singular. Not even mi is singular. If I am addressing a group of people, the correct word is do! If I am addressing a group of people and referring to them as well as some others, then I would use do'o. --mi'e mark.

BTW, this is a fun page to edit. When I'm done, the Wiki thanks me for editing Hamlet!


(Shakespeare runs the gamut from Elizabethan colloquialisms to expressions that even in his own time, would have seemed archaic or "inkhorn". This would be a good place to introduce the Borrowing from Loglan orrowing of Loglan words, if anywhere...)