| vowel epigrams | karsna se cpinyctusku |
| Lojban is a beautifully appropriate language for epigrams, because it allows highly-compressed expression dense with suggested meaning. I have written five "vowel epigrams", each using only one of Lojban's five basic vowels. | ni'o la lojban. le nu cpinyctu cu melbi mapti le ka ly. curmi le nu so'umei valsi selsku poi carmi le ka selsmadi smuni .i mu da poi lojbo ke sampu karsna zo'u mi finti pa me'e karsna se cpinyctusku poi ro karsna po'e ke'a me da |
| Jay : Lojban : vowel epigrams |
Writing these was a helpful exercise in understanding the power of Lojban's connectives, which are especially useful in these compressed stylized sayings.
The lujvo used here are mostly nonce-words that aren't worth including on the lujvo list. To get by with only one vowel at a time, one must stretch the language!
ma'a pampa'a naja parma'a
Literally, "We are, if love-hopers, then climbing-mountains." More naturally, "Who hopes for love is a mountain to be climbed." Unmarked figurative use seems natural in aphorisms.
le'e mlekrepre ze'e mlebetxre
This one is easy to translate: "The stereotypical beautiful-haired person is at all times a mixture of beauty and tragedy."
ki'igi vrici jinvi gi ti'icki friti
"Having varied opinions is related to offering hypotheses."
snospo jo fombo'o ro ropno lojbo
This one is especially difficult to translate (which is appropriate!). One rendition is "Everything Euro-Lojbanic, where it forms a sheet of foam, is being slowly destroyed."
At the risk of over-interpreting, a more natural English version is "The frothy European-influenced aspects of Lojban will be slowly destroyed."
skusmusnu ju xu tu'urcurnu
To give a flavor of the Lojban, a literal gloss is "speaker-meaning-discusser whether-or-not? tubeworm".
More loosely, "Do even tubeworms talk about meanings?" The most famous tubeworms are exotic animals that live near deep-sea hydrothermal vents.