Talk:L17-01
Prioritized ToDo list
Dictionary structure
- Explain tricky cases like with kau and nonce infinitives in the definitions themselves
In Lojban there are several types of nouns:
- entity: pronouns and those that are marked with la (names), lo, le, la, loi.
- infinitives: they start with lo ka, le ka, loi ka.
- quotes:
- If a place is marked as "text" then a quote like zo or lu ...li'u must go into that place.
- in {lo nu brife cu bacru} selbri wins and bacru1 is an object
- in {mi vecnu lo plise} selbri wins and vecnu2 is an abstraction thus the parser ends in {mi vecnu tu'a lo plise}
- object=>any type mutce, milxe, dukse, satci, and so on. In fact any time one of the arguments is a property of another argument, there's a good chance that the type of that other argument is dictated only by the type of the ce'u in the property, This also applies to comparatives (zmadu, mleca, dunli, simsa,...) It would be easier to revise the list if you sort it by type signature rather than just alphabetically.For comparatives, the property is a property of each of two arguments, not just the first.
go'i
- na
- xu lo pixra na srana = "Is it not true that the picture is relevant?"
- go'i = "Yes, it is not true." / - ja'a go'i = "No, it is true, it is relevant."
- xu lo pixra cu na'e srana nai = "Is the picture not-relevant?"
- go'i = "No, it is relevant." {go'i} doesn't copy attitudinals {xu} and {nai} and we are left with {lo pixra cu srana}.
More about {na}: http://mw.lojban.org/extensions/cll/15/9/
xorlo
- {ci ractu cu broda} = {ci da poi ractu cu broda} = there are three rabbits such that each of them broda's.
- {ci lo ractu cu broda} = among the things we refer to as {lo ractu} (with all the contextual effects of that), three of them each broda.
- {lo ci ractu cu broda} = there are three rabbits, and among them, they broda (whether collectively, distributively, or some other way)
The "there are" in those two statements are different. The first one is "there exists", the second one is more like "we're talking about".
ci lo xarju poi vofli cu melbi 3 of the pigs that fly are beautiful |
ci lo poi vofli ku'o xarju ci lo xarju ku poi vofli of the 3 pigs, those that fly are beautiful |
re le poi ninmu ku'o mu prenu cu klama le zarci Two women out of the five persons go to the market. |
Per that reading ci lo xarju ku poi vofli cu melbi (Three fliers among the pigs are beautiful)
cirko: So lo xo'e broda poi brode is the same as lo xo'e broda je brode, right?
cirko: Apparently ci lo poi sipna ku'o gerku is synonymous to ci lo gerku ku poi sipna.
bi lo bakni *ku* poi cikna cu citka eight things that [are among [the cows] and are awake] are eating . |
So without the ku it binds to the selbri and becomes sort of an adverbial clause?
the ku poi versions asserts that the cows are awake. The ku-less version only says that the eight things among the cows are awake (but not the others ones) so basically it's ((re le mu prenu ku) poi ninmu) and (re (le mu prenu poi ninmu)). According to la tersmu lo re bakni ku poi ke'a pinxe is ambiguous as to whether ke'a refers to one or many or all of the cows.
ambigu'i
Exemplary sentences I might choose a couple from:
- I don't drink alcohol for religious reasons. I drink it for other reasons.
- A logician's wife is having a baby. The doctor immediately hands the newborn to the dad. The wife says, "Is it a boy or a girl?" The logician says, "Yes."
- Me and my brother are getting married this summer.
- The man knocked on the front door and housekeeper Sarah Lim came down the stairs in a nightgown and opened it to let the visitor in.
- Mano met a woman with a wooden leg named Aminah.
- The lady hit the man with an umbrella.
- They are looking for teachers of French, German and Japanese.
- Fred saw the plane flying over Zurich.
- Fred saw the mountains flying over Zurich.
- The police arrested the demonstrators because they committed violence.
- The police arrested the demonstrators because they feared violence.
- Mary saw the dog in the store window and wanted it.
- Mary saw the dog in the store window and pressed her nose up against it.
- Some children may not swim because they won't behave. May children who will go home?
Splicing in time
- at 2 o'clock = ti'u li re pi'e xo'e
- at 2:00 = ti'u li re
- during the first two hours = ca lo pamoi be lo cacra be li re
- ???next hour = ca lo remoi be lo cacra
- de'i li pa - on [January] 1
- ba de'i li pa ki cabu = tomorrow
- de'i li pa poi se masti ki cabu = next month
- ti'u li pa = at 1 o'clock
- ba ti'u li pa ki cabu = next hour
- ti'u li pa poi se snidu ki cabu = next second
be and selbri
lo mlatu cu sipna bu'u lo tuple be mi (a sentence from nintadni)
no need for su'u or something!
- could someone explain me the use of "be" as in "mi nelci lo bangu be mi". {be} attaches places to nouns. E.g. {bangu} = is a language. {bangu mi} = is a language of me. But when you turn {bangu} into a noun by adding {lo} you would get two nouns: {lo bangu mi} = "language, I". To still attach it to {bangu} you use {be}.
- http://selpahi.weebly.com/archive-pre-2014/the-x2-rule Both of the rules mentioned there are wrong. The correct rule is "if there are no sumti before the selbri, then counting starts at x2 instead of x1"
- a verb in front of anywhere other than the beginning of the sentence. (We can't just put the selbri at the very beginning of the sentence, without fa before the x1 sumti, because this would imply ‘someone/something' for the first place: the selbri would become an observative.)
- Consider:
(1) mi dunda no da su'o de
(2) mi dunda be no da su'o de
(1) means that I don't give anything to anyone, while I'm suggesting that (2) should mean that there's someone to whom I give nothing.
In other words, (1) is:
no da su'o de zo'u mi da de broda
with broda = "dunda", whereas (2) should be:
su'o de zo'u mi de brode
with brode = "dunda be no da", where "be no da" is part of the selbri, not part of the arguments of the main bridi.
- <@tsani> 1) moving sumti before and after the selbri does not alter the place structure, as long as there is at least one sumti in the bridi head.
08:01 <@tsani> 2) a be-clause produces a new selbri, by partially applying it to one or more sumti. 08:01 <@tsani> (the second premise is evidenced in the formal grammar)
to have
- Which name do you have? We simply use the predicate {cmene}:
.i mi se cmene zo tsani -> "My name is 'tsani'." .i zo .djeikyb. cmene mi -> "'Jacob' is my name."
- For legal ownership, there's {ponse}:
.i mi ponse lo re karce -> "I own two cars." .i mi ponse lo mu mlatu -> "I own five cats."
- For pets, it may make more sense to use {kurji} instead of {ponse}.
.i mi kurji lo ci gerku -> "I take care of three dogs."
- For obligations, we use {bilga} with a ka-abstraction or a tanru.
.i mi bilga lo ka jibykai -> "I must work." .i mi jibykai bilga -> "I must work." .i mi bilga co cidja dunda fi lo mlatu -> "I must feed the cats."
- For necessities, we use {nitcu}. nitcu vs bilga depends on how badly the thing is needed or the nature of the need.
.i mi nitcu lo ka citka -> "I need to eat." .i mi nitcu lo ka sipna -> "I need to sleep."
- For physical possession of things, regardless of ownership, you can use {bevri} and {jgari}:
.i mi bevri lo samyfonxa -> "I have a smartphone." (not saying that you own it; it could be someone else's) .i mi jgari lo xance be do -> "I'm holding your hand."
- Sumti possessives can be formed with {pe}:
{lo stizu pe do} -> "your chair", literally "the chair restrictively-related-to you" i.e. the fact that you're associated somehow to the chair is information allowing us to disambiguate among some bunch of contextually-relevant chairs. {pe} can be rendered with the selbri {srana} or with {co'e}: .i lo stizu cu srana do -> "The chair is associated with you." .i lo stizu do co'e -> "The chair has an obvious/unimportant relationship with you." ==Scope
- mi na cadzu ki'u lo nu carvi
It's not that I walk when it's raining.- Here, the speaker might imply that he or she likes going in the rain.
- a bridi creates a new scope
- but it inherits undeclared variables from parent scopes
- da scope.
- {da zo'u da broda .i je da brode} = {da zo'u ge da broda gi da brode} = {suzdza lo ka poi'i ge ke'a broda gi ke'a brode}
- 05:03 < Ilmen> {da poi'i ge ke'a broda gi ke'a brode}
13:41 < selpahi> {ze'i so'i roi plipe} vs {so'i roi ze'i plipe}, {ze'i lo mentu mi so'i roi [ri] cu plipe} vs {so'i roi ku mi plipe ze'i lo snidu}
{puku da renvi} = there were survivors.
{da puku renvi} = Some survived.
{mi co'u ponse da} ----> tolcfa fa lo nu li su'o kaidza lo ka mi ponse ke'a - i lost everything. {da co'u se ponse mi} - there is something i lost.
I wasn't sure whether you were saying you come here when you are writing, or you don't come here often because you are usually writing
{mi ru'inai jundi mu'i lo nu finti} implies the former
"i come here rarely in order to write" - "in order to write i come here rarely"
{mi na klama mu'i tu'a lo carvi} (“It is not true that [I go motivated by the rain]”), when they actually mean {mi na'e klama mu'i tu'a lo carvi} (“[I don't go], which is motivated by the rain”).
< durka42> gleki: the classic example of going to the bank in the rain, for one 10:30 < gleki> durka42: pardon? 10:31 < lai_az> le nu mutce nandu mi cu rinka zo'e bi'unai 10:31 < lai_az> or zo'e bi'u if its new 10:31 < lai_az> or ti etc 10:31 < durka42> gleki: mi na klama lo banxa ki'u lo nu carvi 10:32 < gleki> sounds like "i dont drink alcohol for religious reasons" 10:32 < durka42> same, yes 10:33 < gleki> but how to translate it? for me the straightforward translations is a mental puzzle 10:33 < durka42> na-ki'u: religion isn't the reason I drink alcohol; ki'u-na: due to religion I don't drink 10:46 < gleki> and with the rain? 10:46 < durka42> na-ki'u: rain doesn't draw me to the bank, or something, u'i
Following Lojban usage, I observe an extremely high number of scope mistakes. It appears that people are generally unaware. Their sentences are usually still understood "thanks" to the human capability of letting context fix scope dependencies. That's why these mistakes tend to go unnoticed. Nobody corrects these mistakes, and they keep on being made. It's a problem, but it's not too late to get a new awareness of scope.One of the most common scope mistake is this:
(1) mi na terve'u lo stagi ki'u lo nu mi na bevri lo jdini "I did not buy vegetables because I didn't have money with me."
If you just read the English, your mind is likely to autocorrect the scope, causing you to miss the problem in the Lojban sentence. Though this might seem like an obvious mistake, I just saw someone make it again today.
Sentence (1) actually means: "That I bought vegetables because I didn't have money with me is false."
That's how the Lojban should be understood, but it often isn't. A practical fix is to use {.i ki'u bo}:
(2) mi na terve'u lo stagi .i ki'u bo mi na bevri lo jdini "I didn't buy vegetables. The reason for that is that I didn't have money with me."
The other method requires forethought, which might seem annoying, but you'll soon come to realize (if you haven't already) that forethought is needed in all of Lojban the moment you begin to scope-juggle.
(3) mi ki'u lo nu na bevri lo jdini cu na terve'u lo stagi "I, because [I] didn't have money with me, did not buy vegetables."
Case in point?
There are also cases of scope mistakes that I observe even among otherwise experienced Lojbanists. This is usually the case when multiple tenses are being used. Often, people just tack on an additional tense at the end of their already-tensed phrase, and the result is usually a sentence with incorrect scope, which the speaker doesn't notice.
There is a difference between {ca pu} and {pu ca}. There is a difference between {pu co'a} and {co'a pu}. You normally cannot reverse the order of phrase operators and expect to get the same result each time. While initially a difficulty, it's also one of the strong points of Lojban. It's the very thing Lojban is supposed to be good at. To neglect this aspect is to neglect Lojban.
Learning to use this feature correctly requires one to rethink. Lojban is not English. It's not even close. It just happens to sometimes be able to mirror the word order. It quickly stops doing that once the statements get more complex, at which time it drifts more towards SOV languages. It's not unnatural for a language to require constant forethoughts. Japanese and Turkish do it, just to name two. (Also note that when I say "forethought", I'm not talking about forethought connectives, although they can help. I'm talking about the general concept of thinking ahead).
Simply put, you have to learn (practically by rote, or by making the same mistake many times and correcting it until it sticks) what operators should precede what operators in what situation. Having some mental categories of different situations is very helpful and, I assume, inevitable. Well, to be sure, there are always other methods, but this one doesn't seem so painful. To give you an example, you need to simply know that a prenexed quantifier is required in this general instruction manual sentence:
(4) "Thirdly, everyone holds on to the rope."
Suppose this is a sentence that describes a hypothetical setup that the instruction manual is trying to explain to you. We can argue that the rope is not definite. It can be any rope (so {lo} fits more than {le}), but everyone is supposed to hold on to the same rope, that's the important part. The naive translation fails:
(4a) ci mai .ei ro lo prenu cu jgari lo skori
This doesn't tell us that everyone is supposed to hold on to the same rope. And we also cannot use {le} (and even if we could, it's not really the point of this example). (4a) is vague about the rope business. So what now? As I said, this type of situation needs a prenexed quantifier:
(4b) ci mai .ei pa da poi skori zo'u: ro lo prenu da jgari
This tells us explicitly that each person is supposed to hold on to the same rope.
Yes, you can also just reverse the order of the sumti as in (5), but it would be a different kind of word order (which proves my point, but messes up the example. If you want to mirror the English, (4b) is the way to go).
(5) ci mai .ei pa skori cu se jgari ro lo prenu
This one is shorter, not requiring an explicit prenex, and no explicit {da} binding. It does require one to change the order of the arguments, though, which might not always be desirable. Sometimes, placing a sumti in the x1 achieves a certain effect, e.g. topicalization and switching arguments can potentially ruin that.
It's also handy to know that generally location and time tags come before everything else, but you need to know in what types of situations they don't. For instance, try to figure out when you want {ca ... pu ...} and when {pu ... ca ...}.
Raise your awareness. But beware, you'll suddenly notice lots of mistakes! Maybe you don't want to eat of that tree.
Anyway, in this fashion every possible scenario can be put into a category.
I'm not going to lay out all those possibilities here. I think it's good to think about this topic for yourself and to compare the different meanings the different scopes produce.
Seeing so many scope mistakes every day is slightly painful for me, because I currently have a very high awareness of the subject matter. It's easy to overlook, and I wasn't always aware of it either. Heck, only recently did I realize that my staple {tai ... ja'e ...} has inccorect scope. I'm sure there are many more constructions out there that need to be reconsidered. I'm not afraid to re-adjust my Lojban, and I recommend everyone to do the same.
Lojban tends to be left-grouping, tanru and connectives for example are left-grouping. However, scope is ... "right-grouping". I'm not sure if others conceptualize it this way, but one way to parse multiple scopes is to consider each scope operator to create a sort of bubble to its right, and those bubbles are right-grouping. Abstractly: Abstractly:
⎛ ⎛ ⎛ ⎞⎞⎞ .i op1⎜ A op2 ⎜ broda B op3⎜ C D ⎟⎜⎜ ⎝ ⎝ ⎝ ⎠⎠⎠
op = phrase operator, capital letters represent constants (i.e. unquantified sumti), the brackets should speak for themselves.
Obviously, I think scope should be given a lot more importance. It is the thing that determines the structure and word order of sentences. By acknowledging it, we can get closer to Lojban's true word order.
Issues: unsorted ones
- 1. and 2. are to be solved by using prototypes. xunre is an idealistic prototype not present in real world. Or we can remember Einstein's words that all electrons have the same mass because they are simply the same electron (projected many times into the physical Universe).
- 22:34 < gleki> 1. there are 100 women, 10% of them are pretty. He likes 10 those women
22:35 < gleki> 2. There are 100 women, 10 % of them are pretty. He like 10% of pretty women, i.e. he likes one woman. 22:36 < durka42> remai nelci dauce'i lo ro ninmu poi melbi ku noi panomei 22:37 < durka42> camxes: -f nelci dauce'i lo ro ninmu poi melbi ku noi panomei 22:37 < camxes> (nelci [dau ce'i] [lo {ro ninmu <poi melbi>} ku] [noi {pa no} mei]) 22:38 < durka42> panono da ninmu .i pano ri melbi .i nelci ri 22:38 < durka42> ja'o nelci ro lo pano lo panono ninmu ku poi melbi 22:39 < durka42> camxes: -f ja'o nelci ro lo pano lo panono ninmu ku poi melbi 22:39 < camxes> (ja'o [nelci {ro <lo (¹pa no¹) (¹lo [{pa <no no>} ninmu] ku¹) (¹poi melbi¹)>}]) 22:39 < durka42> replace {lo pano} with {lo dauce'i} if you want 22:40 < maik_> gleki, you meant to say "He likes _the_ 12% of women who are pretty" earlier
- 12:44 < gleki> how to express "if(broda){brode}else{brodi}" without repeating broda twice?
12:45 < b_jonas> tsanire: it is the start of {.i ga nai go'i gi brodu} 12:45 < b_jonas> tsanire: so the whole thing would be {.i brodi .i ja broda .i ga nai go'i gi brodu} 12:46 < b_jonas> and I'm asking whether that means the same as {.i brodi .i ja broda .i ga nai broda gi brodu} 12:47 < b_jonas> and if it doesn't mean that, then I wonder what you could say instead of "go'i" to refer back to just "broda", where "broda" here is placeholder for a whole bridi which could be long 12:49 < latro`a> if there's some dispute about boundaries between bridi, then you could circumlocute by reifying the selbri and assigning it 12:49 < latro`a> {.i brodi .i ja me'au lo du'u broda goi ko'a .i ga nai me'au ko'a gi brodu} 12:49 < b_jonas> latro`a: yes, you could certainly assign it with cei (if I understand it right what cei means) 12:50 < b_jonas> I don't think you have to reify it for that 12:50 < latro`a> if go'i has a problem than cei does too- 12:50 < b_jonas> just assign it to brodo with cei 12:50 < latro`a> they're essentially the same idea 12:50 < b_jonas> what... oh cr 12:50 < b_jonas> you're right 12:50 < b_jonas> it's because cei is too greedy 12:50 < b_jonas> it gobbles up more than you put it next to
- < Ilmen> it's similar to selpa'i's proposal for a cmavo allowing "proprietor fronting" (split of a NU into an object and a property)
09:15 < mukti> So the "part of" bit of your gloss of {jai cumki} has me interested. 09:15 < danr> mukti: It should be an easily accesible sumti 09:16 < mukti> Somehow x1 participates in xFAI ? 09:16 < Ilmen> "he's easy to trick" ---> ko'a jai frili loka se tcica 09:16 < gleki> quickly spltting an abstraction into an object+ its property is one of the highly needed features in lojban. 09:16 < Ilmen> in kind of nu-split is common in English
- «lu no da zo'u: mi smàdi lo du'u da dùnda lo jdìni li'u» frìca «lu mi smàdi lo du'u no da zo'u: da dùnda lo jdìni li'u»
- {fi'o gunma je fa lo tadni cu sruri}?
If ca'a modifies a selbri, why not inside a lo construct? 08:05 < latro`a> darsi: that would modify the wrong selbri 08:05 < darsi> oh, right. 08:05 < latro`a> we want {ko'a ca'a mruli .i ko'e ka'e se mruli} and then to somehow join these two
- no, I don't want erasure erasure is textual. I'd like semantic one, not syntactic erasure
23:51 erasure with {sa} is ok if I misspoke, but in this case I didn't misspoke, I was just wrong about some fact 23:51 < gleki> {mi bebna i go'i je'unai i do go'i} = I am a fool. Wait, it's not true. YOU are a fool. 23:52 gleki: yes, that negates the previous statement, but then how do I tell the next statement is something of similar scope that corrects the wrong statement, not just something unrelated? 23:53 < gleki> I need an example because .uinai I cant understand you yet. 23:55 ok, how about something like "The house is big. No, that's wrong. Actually, the house is small." 23:56 now {.i go'i .uinai} could express the "No, that's wrong." part, but how do I say "Actually,"? 23:58 < gleki> lo dinju cu barda i oi go'i je'unai i lo go'i cu cmalu je'u Day changed to 27 Mar 2014 00:00 < gleki> It might look tricky because {lo go'i} refers to the first sumti in the second sentence. And {go'i} in the second sentence refers to the phrase in the first sentence.
- a prosumti for something actually unknown would be cool
- 13:31 < acolotl> E.g. {mi broda Y} -> {mi broda zo'e noi ke'a ka'e se no'a}
- 13:31 < acolotl> It can be used for a restricted "everything"
- 13:32 < acolotl> {mi djuno ro da} could be understood as too extreme
- 13:32 < acolotl> but {mi djuno ro Y} is "I know everything that is knowable"
- 13:33 < acolotl> And {ro Y prami do} means "Everyone that can love you does"
- 13:33 < acolotl> Y is just everything that could fill this place
- 13:33 < xalbo> I think it's just more useful to assume that {da} is contextually bound, because otherwise it's completely useless.
- There are two types of conjunctions: logical and non-logical. Logical conjunctions say something about whether and in what circumstances the two things connected are true; an example is je. Non-logical conjunctions do not deal with separate truth values, but group things together to form different kinds of units.
- Lojban distinguishes between the logical component of conjunctions, and their attitudinal content. For example, most languages have different words for and and but. Logically, they both mean the same thing. In terms of attitude, however, they are different: but contains a connotation of contrast or unexpectedness, which and does not. So Lojban translates but in two parts: je ku'i = and however. This follows the Lojban principle of keeping content and attitude separate (e.g. .ui la .jasmin. cu klama ti has a content element — the information that Jasmine is coming here, and an attitude element — happiness).
- Lojban also handles some of the functions of English conjunctions in other ways — as we saw, because and so are translated with prepositions, not conjunctions.
- I understand now that that is how it works, but if "ro" and "pa" combine with other members of PA differently, then how can they be considered members of the same selma'o?
- They behave the same way grammatically, but their interpretation, which is a semantic feature not governed directly by the grammar, depends on the exact words used. The CLL describes these interpretations:
- Another possibility is that of combining definite and indefinite numbers into a single number. This usage implies that the two kinds of numbers have the same value in the given context:
8.18) mi viska le rore gerku
I saw the all-of/two dogs. I saw both dogs.
8.19) mi speni so'ici prenu
I am-married-to many/three persons. I am married to three persons (which is “many” in the circumstances).
(Chapter 18, section 8, at the bottom.)
Some lojbanists extend these interpretations in many different directions, but those usages are (sadly) nonstandard. The general rule that we can discern from this CLL excerpt is that when an exact number and an inexact number are sequenced, then the result is as if these numbers were logically connected with {.e}.
- Explain lo nu broda pu brode - and use {lo nu broda cu pu brode}. so {lo} and {sei} require the selbri to be the last word. {nu} allows anything: prepositions, nouns, at the end
- lo nu tcidu ca nandu - The current reading complication
- lo nu tcidu cu ca nandu - The reading is now difficult
- lo nu tcidu ca cu nandu - The current reading is difficult.
- xalbo: In your section "the simplest sentences", it might be beneficial to make one of your examples an "adjective" (colors are good), to show that they're verbs too.
- gleki: wait, adjectives are NOI
- [20:26] xalbo: I mean using {blanu} in addition to {mlatu} and {pinxe}
- [20:26] gleki: lo blabi mlatu cu pinxe lo ladru?
- [20:27] xalbo: I'm saying include {blanu}, which is simply translated as "blue", but is really also a verb "to be blue".
- [20:26] gleki: lo blabi mlatu cu pinxe lo ladru?
- [20:26] xalbo: I mean using {blanu} in addition to {mlatu} and {pinxe}
- gleki: wait, adjectives are NOI
banzu
Standard:
- banzu = x1 (object) suffices/is enough/sufficient for purpose x2 under conditions x3.
- sarcu = x1 (abstract) is necessary/required for continuing state/process x2 under conditions x3.
- dukse = x1 is an excess of/too much of x2 by standard x3.
Abandoned proposal:
- banzu = x1 (nu) suffices/is enough/sufficient for purpose x2
- sarcu = x1 (nu) is necessary/required for continuing state/process x2
- dukse = x1 (nu) is an excess of/too much for continuing state/process x2
- Math:
and sarcu? how would you say x1 is necessary and sufficient? 10:43 < latro`a_> sarcu gi'e se jalge 10:46 < latro`a_> or in a more material implication sense, jalge gi'e se jalge 10:46 < latro`a_> which is basically the nu version of {jo} 10:46 < latro`a_> but then, I haven't seen "necessary and sufficient" in an informal context in a long, long time 10:47 < latro`a_> whereas in a formal context {jo} is sufficient
- New:
- sufsi = x1 is enough in x2 (ka/ni) for purpose x3 (nu) to take place
- dukse = x1 is too much in x2 (ka/ni) for purpose x3 (nu) to take place
- New:
the ka form is the same as the ni form after substitution, but with dukse2/banzu2 being zo'e
10:54 < latro`a_> for example, {mi dukse lo ka ma kau zdani ce'u} = {lo zdani be mi cu dukse zo'e} 10:54 < latro`a_> but with modified emphasis
- barda and friends do the same
Super-Advanced: Negation
Lojban presents several words for expressing different shades of negation.
na
- na put immediately before the main verb negates the whole clause:
lo speni be mi cu na ninmu
It is not true that my spouse is a woman.- speni = x1 is married to x2
- It states nothing about what my wife is, or if I even have a wife. It only states that I do not have a wife who is also a woman.
- Similarly, if someone asks you xu do pu viska la .ian. (Did you see Yan?) you can reply na go'i (No.) even you have never heard of any Yan in your life. And you won't be really lying.
na ku
- na ku in the beginning of a clause negates the whole clause:
na ku lo speni be mi cu ninmu and lo speni be mi cu na ninmu mean the same.
It is not true that my spouse is a woman.
- na ku in other positions negates everything to the right of itself within the current clause.
- If I say mi na sutra tavla bau lo glibau se ja'e lo nu mi dotco, I end up negating too much, and it is not clear that I wanted to only negate that I speak fast. The sentence could suggest that I in fact speak fast because of some other reason, for instance that I speak fast in French because I'm German. To express the sentence more precisely, I need to only negate that I speak fast, and not the other things. To only negate part of a clause, na ku can be moved around the clause and placed anywhere a noun can go. It then negates any noun, main verb and preposition placed after it.
- na ku at the rightmost end of the clause is the same as na before the the main verb of this clause.
- Often we need our negation to be a little less powerful. In particular, it is useful to be able to say, not that the whole clause is false, but only the main verb. This means that there is some relationship between the nouns — but this main verb isn't it.
Moving na ku from the left end of the sentence and rightwards effects any quantifiers in a certain way, as can be seen by this example:
na ku ro lo remna cu verba It's not true that: All humans are children. |
su'o lo remna na ku cu verba For at least one human it's not true that: it's a child. |
See that the na ku is placed before cu, since a noun can go only before, not after the cu. Had I only used na, it would have to go after cu — but that would have negated the entire clause, meaning "It's not true that: At least one human is a child".
When the na ku is moved rightwards, any quantifier is inverted — that is: ro is turned into su'o. This is, of course, only if the meaning of the clause has to be preserved. This means that when the na ku is placed at the end of the clause, only the main verb is negated but all the nouns and prepositions are preserved, as can be seen by these three identical clauses:
na ku ro lo verba cu tadni bu'u da poi ckule It's not true that all children are students in a school. |
- ckule = x1 is a school at area x2
su'o lo verba cu tadni na ku bu'u da poi ckule Some children study in not a single school. |
su'o lo verba cu tadni bu'u ro lo ckule na ku Some children are for all schools don't study in them. |
It is possible to use clause negation in all clauses, even the implicit clause of descriptive nouns. lo na prenu can refer to anything non-human, whether it be a sphinx, a baseball or the property of appropriateness.
- lo ninmu na nelci la .ian. = A woman likes Yan
Interjections nai, ru'e, sai, cu'i and na'i
- nai being an interjection attaches to the right of a construct and negates it.
tu bajra mlatu nai
That is a running non-cat.tu bajra nai mlatu
That is a non-running cat.- As you can see nai is applied only to the last verb of a compound verb.
- When attempting to answer: “Is the king of the USA fat?”, all of these negations fail. While it's technically correct to negate it with na, since it makes no assumptions of that is true, it's mildly misleading since it could lead the listener to believe there is a king of the USA. For these scenarios, there is a metalinguistic negator, na'i.
- na'i — metalinguistic negator. Something is wrong with assigning a truth value to the clause.
- Because na'i has the grammar of interjections.
Scalar negation
na'e attaches to the left of a construct and negates it implying the existence of a scale:
tu na'e bajra mlatu That is a other-than-running cat. |
tu bajra na'e mlatu That is a running other-than-cat. |
- (making us wonder what a non-cat might be)
My spouse is not a woman (meaning that he is a male).
lo speni be mi cu na'e ninmu or lo speni be mi cu to'e ninmu.- Using scalar negation here implies that he exists, which na did not.
Another unexpected effect compared to English not:
However,mi na nelci ro lo gerku means It is not true that I like each dog.
mi na'e nelci ro lo gerku means I don't like any dogs.
While the mechanism of na ku resembles negation in English, it can be difficult to keep track of exactly what is negated and how that affects the clause. For that reason, the construct na ku is rarely seen anywhere other than the beginning of a clause. In most cases where more specific negation is needed people resort to a scalar negation using na'e. With na'e only a certain construcut is affected whereas with na ku everything to the right of it is negated. This is the reason na ku is used rather seldom and mostly at the beginning of the sentence. In
mi na'e nelci ro gerku I other-than-like all dogs. |
there is something that can be said about me and all dogs, but it's not that I like them.
I might hate them:
mi to'e nelci ro gerku I anti-like (= dislike) all dogs. |
to'e turns a main verb into its opposite: to'e nelci is pretty much the same thing as xebni — to hate.
Or I just might be neutral to them. I might write poems about them, or prescribe medicine for them, imitate them in polite company, or just might be indifferent to them. Then we'll use no'e:
mi no'e nelci ro gerku I am neutral-as-to-liking all dogs. |
But as for liking them, I don't.
Thus na'e is not a negator in the same sense as na. It doesn't state that a clause is false, but makes a positive statement that a clause is true – the same clause, but with a different main verb. This distinction is mostly academic, though. If, for example, I state mi na'e se nelci — I am non-liked, I actually state that some main verb applies to me, which is also on a relevant scale with the main verb nelci. Most of the time, we assume a scale where the positions are mutually exclusive like "like — dislike — hate", so mi na'e se nelci implies mi na se nelci. Therefore, the words no'e and to'e should only be used when the main verb is placed on some obvious scale: lo speni be mi cu to'e melbi – My spouse is ugly makes sense, since we immediately know what the opposite of beautiful is, while mi klama lo to'e zdani be mi – I go to my opposite thing of home, while grammatical, leaves the listener guessing what the speaker's opposite of home is and should be avoided.
My spouse is not really a woman.
lo speni be mi cu no'e ninmu
The scale here is presumed to be from woman to man.
I don't speak fast in English because I'm German.
mi na'e sutra tavla bau lo glibau se ja'e lo nu mi dotco
Chat
05:06 < nargavela> BTW I should ask on the mriste how to express the PEG '/' operator; it is a must for describing Lojban syntax in Lojban 05:12 < nargavela> na broda = broda be naku 05:13 < markuja> .i lu na broda su'o da li'u na dunli lu broda be naku su'o da li'u
Negation and neutral meaning
nai is an interjection that makes a part of sentence negative in meaning. nai means no or not.
- interjection in Lojban modifies the construct to the left of it.
mi nelci nai do I don't like you. I like-not you (literally). [literally] |
mi nai nelci do Not I like you. (may be someone else likes you) [literally] |
- So when put after certain part of the phrase like pronoun or a verb it modifies that verb.
- if put in the beginning of a phrase interjection modifies the whole phrase:
nai mi nelci do It's not true that I like you. |
- So in the beginning of the phrase nai negates the whole phrase.
- we can put an interjection after different parts of the same phrase shifting the meaning.
The interjection cu'i makes a part of sentence middle in its meaning.
mi nelci cu'i do As for whether I love or hate you, I'm indifferent to you. I neither like nor hate you. |
Double negation
Sometimes it's necessary to use double negation. Let's show how this works using examples from English and Chinese.
The structure 非...不可 (fēi … bùkě) is one of the most commonly used in Mandarin Chinese. It means "must"/"absolutely must"/"need to." 非 means "not"/"no" and 不可 means "not possible". It's literally translated as "not not possible."
- mi na cfifa'i ra na fau da
- 我非批评她不可。
- wǒ fēi pīpíng tā bùkě
I can't not to criticize her
.- I absolutely must criticize her.
- mi'ai na tadni na fau da
- 我们非学习不可。
- wǒmen fēi xuéxí bùkě
- We must study.
- mi'ai tadni nai fau no da
We can't not study.
fau and if
There is some controversy about against using jo and ja nai for expressing if and only if. First you shouldn't use ja nai (if) when jo (only if) is meant. And in natural languages if is strongly tied up with notions of causality, precondition, or deduction — none of which is particularly emphasized by ja nai and jo as they are strictly logical conjunctions. For example, ja nai will give a poor rendering of It's not true that, if I'm rich, I'm happy — which is decidedly not the same thing as It's not true that I'm either not rich or happy! For that reason, you will see many Lojbanists avoiding jo and ja nai in ordinary speech, and instead using prepositions like fau - in the event of..., va'o - under conditions..., se ja'e - results from ... happening, or ni'i - logically caused by....
Better examples of using them in ordinary speech:
- ja gi nai je gi ro da poi badna zo'u da pelxu gi mi citka lo badna gi mi citka lo pelxu
- If everything for every banana it is true that it is yellow, and I am eating a banana, then I am eating something yellow.
- ja gi nai je gi ro pipybanfi cu crino gi la .kermit. cu pipybanfi gi la .kermit. cu crino
- If every frog is green, and Kermit is a frog, then Kermit is green.
Non-logical conjunctions
- lo jisra joi lo djacu - the juice and the water, considered together
This is the same as lo gunma be lo jisra je lo djacu.
- djacu = x1 is some water
- jisra = x1 is some juice
Not all English sentences containing and are like this, though. Firstly, sentences like I had a bath and washed my hair are structurally different and will be dealt with later on. Secondly, I visited Ranjeet and Jasmine is slightly different from I visited Ranjeet and I visited Jasmine. In this case, you probably want to say that you visited Ranjeet-and-Jasmine as a unit on one occasion — not that you visited Ranjeet and Jasmine on (potentially) different occasions (It is true that I visited Ranjeet, and it is true that I visited Jasmine.) In this case you don't want je (which is true but potentially misleading), but joi, which means ‘in a mass with’. So what you have is
- mi pu vitke la .ranjit. joi la .jasmin.
- I past visit Ranjeet in-a-mass-with Jasmine.
- I visited Ranjeet and Jasmine (together).
This is just like the difference between lo ci gerku and loi ci gerku which we looked at in Lesson 4 — considering the three dogs as individuals, or as a mass. Incidentally, it is not just Lojban which makes this distinction; Turkish, for example, would use ile (‘with’) rather than ve (‘and’) for joi here.
By non-logical conjunctions, we mean that the truth of the combined terms does not depend on the truth of the individual components. It may not be true that la .kris. cu bevri lo pipno. Chris carries the piano, or la .pat. cu bevri lo pipno Pat carries the piano, for example (to revisit an example from Lesson 4), even if it is true that la .kris. joi la .pat. cu bevri lo pipno Chris and Pat carry the piano.
Lojban has several other non-logical conjunctions; we'll cover the most frequently used ones:
- fa'u carries the meaning of respectively: it relates pairs of sumti cross-wise. If I were to say
- la .alis. je la .jasmin. cu tavla la .djang. je la .ranjit.
that means that both Alice and Jasmine talk to both Zhang and Ranjeet. If I want to say that Alice only talked to Zhang, and Jasmine only to Ranjeet (i.e. Alice and Jasmine talked to Zhang and Ranjeet, respectively'), a logical conjunction is not useful. Instead, I would use fa'u to connect both pairs of sumti:
- la .alis. fa'u la .jasmin. cu tavla la .djang. fa'u la .ranjit.
Alice, cross-wise with Jasmine, talks to Zhang, cross-wise with Ranjeet.
- If you're talking about a range, you use bi'i to describe the range between the first thing and the second thing; so it corresponds to English between. If you want to say I dropped my pencil somewhere between the office and the bar, you would describe the location somewhere between the office and the bar as lo briju ku bi'i lo barja. The whole sentence would come out as:
- mi falcru lemi pinsi vi lo briju bi'i lo barja
- If the order of the things defining the range matters, you use bi'o. This corresponds to from... to... in English (though between covers both ordered and unordered intervals.) For example, from 1 PM to 2 PM is an interval lasting an hour; but from 2 PM to 1 PM would normally be interpreted as a 23-hour interval (1 pm the following day), since times in English are assumed to be presented in order. Lojban follows suit with li pavo lo'o bi'o li paci as a 23-hour interval. If I said li pavo lo'o bi'i li paci, the order of the two times would not matter at all; so I could still be talking about a one-hour interval instead.
The word "logical" in "logical connective" refers to the association a logical connective has with a truth function. Not all useful connectives can be defined through a truth function, however, and so there are other connectives beside the logical ones. The meaning of a logical connective is defined the same as two different bridi connected with that logical connective. For instance, mi nitcu do .a la .djan. is defined to be equivalent to mi nitcu do .i ja mi nitcu la .djan.. This definition is useful to bear in mind, because it implies that sometimes, sumti cannot be connected with logical connectives without chaning the meaning. Consider the sentence: "Jack and Joe wrote this play." One attempt at a translation would be: ti draci fi la .djak. e la .djous. draci x1 is a drama/play about x2 by writer/dramatist x3 for audience x4 with actors x5 |
The problem with this translation is that it means ti draci la .djak. ije ti draci la .djous., which is not really true. Neither Jack nor Joe wrote it, they did so together. What we want here is of course a mass, and some way to join Jack and Joe in one mass. This has little to do with a truth function so we must use a non-logical connective, which are of selma'o JOI. We'll return to this Jack and Joe-problem in a little - first: Four of the known JOI: |
The Lojban connective: | ce | ce'o | joi | jo'u |
Joins sumti and forms a: | set | sequence | mass | group of individuals |
The functions of these words are simple: lo'i remna jo'u lo'i gerku considers both the set of
Raising
vau needed? So you can translate tu'a as some abstraction associated with..., or more colloquially, some stuff about.... tu'a is easily the most popular way of dealing with abstractions you wish weren't there in Lojban; Lojban sentences using it come out fairly similar to the natural language sentences without abstractions that we're used to seeing. The other function of jai is easier to explain. It simply converts the selbri such that the noun in the x1 gets a tu'a in front of it (ko'a jai broda = tu'a ko'a broda). In other words, it converts the selbri in a way such that it builds an elliptical abstraction from the noun in the x1, and then fills x1 with the abstraction instead of the actual noun. Again, the original noun place is accessible by fai. A very active Lojban IRC-user often says le gerku pe do jai se stidi mi, to use a random example of a noun in x1. What's he say?
Answer: “I suggest (something about) your dog.” When looking up words in the Lojban dictionary, you may have already noticed that, where languages like English have people or things as subjects and objects, Lojban often uses abstractions instead as gismu places. For example, in English, you say that someone is interesting, or something is interesting. In Lojban, you aren't really meant to say either. E.g.:
In other words, as far as Lojban is concerned, it's not things or people that are interesting, but actions or properties involving those things or people. For example, Jasmine cannot be said to be interesting simply by virtue of being Jasmine; the way Lojban puts it, it's the things Jasmine does (or is) that are interesting — the way she talks about British sitcoms, her choice of headgear, her tendency to break into '80s songs after she's had a few drinks.
People are called crazy. Only occasionally are actions also called crazy. In Lojban, however, the verb fenki describes events (or actions, which is the same). In other words, as far as Lojban is concerned, craziness lies in actions, not in people; a crazy person is by definition someone who does crazy actions. Note: This means that someone suffering from the particular forms of mental illness loosely called ‘crazy’ wouldn't be called fenki in Lojban — since their condition is not primarily a matter of socially unacceptable actions — but rather menli bilma - mentally ill. What if you want to say Jasmine is interesting, but you don't care or just unsure what verb to use? I should at least be able to say something like Jasmine {doing some stuff I'm not listing here} is interesting, or Some things about Jasmine are interesting. In other words, I have to say
or
Saying Zhang is crazy (or berserk, probably a closer translation of fenki), I don't have to enumerate the various wacky stunts he has pulled over the years. I can simply say that some stuff about Zhang is crazy, which in Lojban comes out as
The value of co'e could be
or whatever; we're just not bothering to name it here. So the usual Lojban for Jasmine is interesting is
and the usual Lojban for Kevin is crazy is
Lojbanists noticed how linguists have been analyzing these concepts in natural languages, and how they were coming up with their own versions of verbs. Often, what was a noun in one part of the sentence, and a verb in another part, were brought together and considered to be underlyingly part of the same abstraction noun. A good example is the phrase I am difficult to annoy in English. At first sight, you might think that I is a noun of difficult. And grammatically it is: it's the subject. But logically it isn't: what we're describing as difficult is not me. We can't say:
What's actually going on is that, underlyingly, what is difficult is to annoy me: the action of getting me annoyed is what is hard to achieve — not me! This is why English also allows you to say It is difficult to annoy me, and (if you squint a little) To annoy me is difficult. And sure enough, Lojban expresses this concept according to that ‘underlying’ form:
So why did English pull that weird switcheroo with I am difficult to annoy? Basically, because when we talk, we aren't concentrating in our minds on intangible abstractions like the event of annoying me, let alone the state of Jasmine having certain unspecified properties. Instead, we run little stories in our head, with heroes and villains: concrete heroes and villains — people, for the most part. And as it happens, we make the subjects of our sentences be the heroes and villains we're concentrating on. (That's what a subject's ultimate job is: to present what we're concentrating on). So by pulling a switcheroo like that, we're not talking about abstractions and events any more; the subject of the sentence is now our perennially favorite subject — namely me: it's me that is difficult to annoy. (Yes, it is all about me...) This process is called in linguistics raising, because it raises concrete subjects (and objects) we want to talk about, out of the haziness of an abstraction noun (or ‘clausal argument’, to use English logical terminology). Another case is saying
We could say
as melbi requires a noun as it's first (x1) place. But that would be bulky. We have another method
So jai extracts a noun from the verb place containing an event. Thus, it's very useful:
Now both verbs have the same noun in common. Another example. How do I say that someone is a cheat, or a deceiver? The verb for "to deceive" is:
So lo tcica is a trick, not a trickster; a deception, and not a deceiver. To say that someone is a trickster or a deceiver, we need to use tu'a: tu'a zo'e tcica. But you can't put lo in front of tu'a da: the deceiver has to be the x1 of some verb, in order to get their own noun. So we say lo jai tcica. jai changes the place structure of the verb involved. This works just like se changing the place structure of it's verb, swapping its first and second place. If we put jai in front of a verb, its x1 place changes from an event, to any noun contained within the event. Let's try this with a few sentences:
You'll notice that, with these new place structures, the Lojban phrases sound pretty much like their English equivalents. For example,
We can now do with jai those things we couldn't before. The Lojban for Jasmine is interesting and beautiful, for example, is
That's because Jasmine goes in the x1 place of jai cinri, just as it goes into the x1 place of melbi. And if I want to make a noun meaning ‘deceiver’ or ‘trickster’, I can use jai to do it:
However, mi jai nandu does not correspond to I am difficult to annoy. In switching a concrete noun for the original x1 — the event that was difficult — we have lost the abstraction itself: there is nothing in mi jai nandu that means to annoy. But not to worry: Lojban allows you to keep the original event in the verb phrase by preceding it with fai. fai is a place tag like fa and fe. It effectively adds a new place to the verb phrase. So I am difficult to annoy is matched almost word-for-word by the Lojban sentence
And we can apply this pattern further afield; for example, the book took three months to write is in Lojban properly
???what is raising? Raising allows the slightly more familiar-looking
jai allows you to talk about things in a way that is in many ways more natural. Referring to main verb phraseI use BAI in such a way that whenever their source predicate has a noun place that could integrate the main bridi, then they will do so (I explained the same thing in the {to'e ri'a} thread). {du'i} is one such BAI. I define it thus: broda du'i X ~= X dunli lo su'u broda So, I would say, for example: (1) do bajra du'i lo nu lo tirxu cu bajra "Your run is like that of a tiger." It is seldom the case that a concrete object is {dunli} to an abstraction, although it is not impossible. But usually, replacing the X in the above equation with a concrete object will create "non-sense". But we can use {tu'a X} when we don't want to specify the full abstraction, or when it's obvious. (2) do bajra du'i tu'a lo tirxu "You run like a tiger [runs]" The expansion of this {tu'a X} is almost always {lo nu X no'a}, which corresponds to the English in []-brackets in (2). .i tu'a zo du'i pu smuvanbi .i lo do kanla cu dunli lo nu lo lunra cu te gusni lo nicte kei lo ka ma kau ni melbi NumbersSo the numbers from one to nine are as follows:
Notice that the numbers repeat the vowels AEIOU. zero is no (think yes, we have no bananas).
4,592 has a comma in it (or a full stop in some languages, just to make things confusing). We can't use a comma in Lojban, because that means separate these two syllables (as we saw in Lesson 1 with Lojbanized names like .zo,is. for Zoe). What we say instead is ki'o. We don't have to use ki'o, but it can make things clearer. So 4,592 can also be read as vo ki'o musore. ki'o also has the advantage that if the following digits are all zeroes, we don't need to say them, so 3,000 is ci ki'o. You can remember ki'o easily if you think of kilo — a thousand. (The similarity is not coincidental). Just as we have a word for a comma, we also have one for a decimal point: pi. So 5.3 is mupici. In fact, pi is not always decimal; it's the point for whatever number base you're using. But that's a more advanced topic. Tip: Don't get this mixed up with the number pi (π): 3.14159..., which has its own word in Lojban: pai — oddly enough. When you want to talk about numbers as sumti — that is to say, as things in and of themselves — you need to put an article in front of them. But that article cannot be la, and for reasons which hopefully will become clear soon, it cannot be lo either. In front of numbers, Lojban uses the article li. So li pareci means ‘the number one hundred and twenty three’. ‘One, two, three’, on the other hand, would be li pa li re li ci: each li introduces a brand new number. Proportions
This states two facts:
But it doesn't actually state that my fourth sister hates him — she may be indifferent to him, or never have heard of him. One way out of this problem is to use fi'u, which is like the Lojban slash sign. So two out of every three people is really 2/3 of people, or re fi'u ci lo prenu. Of course, this is actually a fraction, and fractions have decimal equivalents. You could also say 0.75 - pi ze mu lo prenu. WRONG! Yes, that's our new friend loi in that sentence. If I had said re fi'u ci lo prenu, that would have to be understood in the same way as re lo prenu or ci lo prenu (i.e. as a count of individuals), and I would have ended up talking about two thirds of a person. In most cultures, chopping up persons into thirds is not considered acceptable behavior even for pollsters or advertisers. On the other hand, chopping up populations into thirds is perfectly acceptable; and that's what lo prenu is. (A population, I mean, not an acceptable. Though on second thought...) Here are some more proportions:
(This is not the same as I don't like any dogs, which would be mi nelci no lo gerku. There are other ways of saying this, but we haven't got enough grammar under our belt yet). Summary
(lu is not an article, it's a quotation mark!)
(Sets turn out to be pretty useful in Lojban, as we'll see towards the end of this course). We also looked briefly at lu'o, which turns a set into a mass, and lu'a, which turns a mass into a set of individuals (‘group’ and ‘ungroup’). Strictly speaking, these aren't articles, though. Build more precise words from basicNoun converters:
Adverbs:
Suffixes:
-pre:
-stu - place:
-sro - store:
-tci - instrument:
lujvo and Deep Gismu Structurejvajvo or regular compound words don't differ much from other verbs. The point in having jvajvo is to quickly create new meanings from existing ones. For example, if kalri means to be open then kalrygau means to open (something) The rule is that we drop the last vowel from the gismu (root verb), add y and then add the suffix -gau.
All four sentences mean the same. kargau is a synonym to kalrygau. What style you choose depends only on you. Thus you can safely speak without any jvajvo always resorting to prepositions like gau or full verbs like gasnu. There is no need in memorizing kalrygau separately as it is easily derived from kalri once you know what the suffix -gau means. Here are some most important suffixes:
We also have prefixes that are put to the beginning of verbs.
If a verb starts with a vowel then you put a prefix, then y' and then the verb:
The y can be dropped if there is only one consonant from each side and both of them are either voiced or voiceless Omitting ySometimes you can omit y when creating a lujvo. The condition is the following:
Examples:
Negative lujvoNote: na has its own rafsi, nar; but na'e is more useful in creating new words. na'e in a selbri still indicates an existing kind of relationship, which you would want to describe with a single lujvo; while na could mean anything, including non-existence — making it too broad a concept for most uses.
We can see that nal is like the English non-, but we need to remember that non-sometimes has other meanings or associations that nal does not have. lo naljvi is simply someone who is not taking part in a competition, not a ‘non-contender’ in the sense of someone who competes but doesn't stand a chance of winning. Similarly lo nalre'a is someone who is not a member of the species homo sapiens (e.g. a chimpanzee or Klingon), and cannot be applied to someone who is inhumane or perceived as subhuman in some way. We can also use nal with sel and its relatives; for example,
As you'll have guessed, the companions of na'e, namely to'e and no'e, have rafsi of their own: tol- and nor-, respectively. So ‘disinterested’, ‘uninterested’ and ‘bored’ in Lojban are norselci'i, nalselci'i and tolselci'i. lujvo can be much more interesting than this; interesting enough, in fact, that we won't be covering them any further here. You can make lujvo out of pretty much any tanru you can devise; this is the main way to introduce ‘new words’ into Lojban. But to make the lujvo you come up with work, you need some background knowledge:
It's worth your while to look into these issues if you'll be using the language seriously, and especially if you'll be writing in it. (lujvo are easier to deal with while writing than while speaking, because you have the time to reflect on how you'll be creating your new word.) At this stage, though, you don't need to go into all that just yet. (See also: http://selpahi.weebly.com/17/post/2014/02/how-to-get-rid-of-formal-rafsi.html ) All of the following affixes produce a regularly derivable brivla with at most one added place. Some will add zero places, some one place. (Note: The option to enter non-derivable definitions for words using a suffix should not be taken away entirely, as it would mean a restriction in what words we can make up. I would suggest to maintain at least a bit of freedom just in case. Still, in the vast majority of cases, the suffixes should yield easy to understand derivations. Extra note: In contrast, words that don't use any catalogued affixes are free to mean whatever their inventors choose. As long as it is morphologically a brivla, it can mean whatever. Lujvo/Gismu/Fu'ivla are no longer regarded as mutually exclusive groups, meaning that a "lujvo" shape can have a fu'ivla definition, or a fu'ivla can have gismu shape, etc. Another consequence is that type 3 fu'ivla and most kinds of type 4 fu'ivla have no reason to exist anymore. A word like {tcizbaga "cheeseburger" is a valid borrowing, because it's a brivla, and we no longer have to add annoying clusters to artificially change its type to fu'ivla.)
These are always placed before a brivla. Prefixes are preferably CCV- so that we don't have to worry about tosmabru. People are supposed to be able to use them spontaneously and creatively, and ideally tosmabru should not be a possible danger. CV[nlr]- is also tosmabru-safe. affix source effect example cfa- (cfari) beginning cfaviska "to catch sight of something" zan- (zabna) positive conn. ... mal- (mabla) negative conn. ran- ? (ranji) continuously ranbajra "run continuously" "keep running" ? (purci) ex- can- (canlu) around an area canbajra "to run around" xru- (xruti) re/back xrudunda "to give back"; xrudarxi "to hit back" pru- (purci) pre-/ahead ... bra- (barda) big cma- (cmalu) small rem- (remna) human Suffixes: These are always placed at the end of a brivla. affix source effect example -bi (binxo) become xunrybi "to become red" "to blush" -zu (zukte) action crezenzu "to practice" -mu (mukti) motive -ri (rinka) cause tatpyri "tiring" -ja (selja'e) result/outcome glekyja "result in being happy" -gau (gasnu) bring about jungau "tell" -dji (djica) want djunydji "to want to know" -ju (djuno) know klamyju "know that someone goes" -tce (mutce) very -ru (ruble) -mau (zmadu) -me (mleca) -rai (traji) -ze (zenba) -di (jdika) decrease glarydi "to cool down" -cu/ki (cumki) possibility cpacycu/cpacyki "available"/"acquirable" -kre (krefu) re-/again krezbasu "rebuild" -si/su/xu? (simxu) each other pramysi "to love each other" -sa? (simsa) -oid/-like remnysa "humanoid" -lu? (simlu) seem morsylu "to appear dead" -ni? (ckaji jibni) -almost -tu/ci?(tutci) tool/utensil ciskyci/ciskytu "writing utensil" ... -fe (fetsi) feminine baknyfe -na (nakni) masculine baknyna () group/crowd remny-CV "a crowd", cinfy-CV "pride of lions" -sra (srana) -ly/pertaining to cevnysra "godly"
Also consider "compound affixes" CVCV combining ideas from multiple other words to get a new affix, possible examples include "-bizu" from "-bi'ozu'e" and "-pazu" from "pagzu'e" (to participate). -sebi (se bilga) obligatory plejysebi "must be paid for" -secu/seni (seltcu/se nitcu) required tcidysecu/tcidyseni "required reading" lo bi'u nai se cukta cu tcidysecu "The book is required reading." lo nu nerkla cu plejysecu "You have to pay to go in." Another idea: A way to derive "easy to X" and "hard to X", e.g. "easy to provoke" or "hard to understand".
Make a list of shapes that are safe from tosmabru no matter what affix gets added. Those word shapes are the most robust and should be preferred over the others. Safe: CVC/CVCV CCVCVCV CCVCV CVC/CV ... Unsafe: CVCCV ... For safe zi'evla shapes, adding -CV suffixes is possible in two ways: Either by replacing the final vowel with -y- and adding -CV or by leaving the vowel alone and adding -CV. E.g. {delfinu} -> {delfinyfe}/{delfinufe}. Doing the latter with unsafe brivla shapes causes tosmabru. Doing it with CCVCV (safe) gismu shapes turns them into safe zi'evla shapes (e.g. gerkufe "female dog"), which could cause collisions with already existing zi'evla. Maybe what gets defined first wins. zi'evlaloan words are a way of introducing new words into Lojban, comparable tolujvo. You got a brief taste of lujvo in Lesson 8. As we said there, lujvo are the main way of introducing new words — more precisely, new brivla — into Lojban. The most important thing about lujvo is that, as selbri, they are meant to have very well-defined place structures; and there are guidelines in place for deriving them (see The Complete Lojban Language, Chapter 12.) So, particularly when the concept you want to express is ‘verb-like’ (that is, when it's likely to have sumti of its own), lujvo are preferred. There are some cases, though, when you do have to borrow a word from another language, creating a loan word (called in Lojban a fu'ivla). This can be because the thing you're talking about is very concrete or particular, and/or because the reference is quite culture-specific. In either case, it would be really cumbersome to describe it with a combination of gismu. (For example, how would you come up with a description for brie? Or rock 'n' roll? — which, we should point out, you would have to keep distinct from the later musical genre of rock!) The problem with borrowing words into Lojban is, Lojban has a quite thorough set-up for working out what the words are in a stream of letters. This means that most words you import into Lojban (once you spell them in Lojban letters) are likely to mean something else already. For example, if I want to bring the ancient name of the river Danube - Istros into Lojban, the last thing I want to do is start saying .istero. That will get analysed as .i stero, which is something like ‘and steradian function’. The sanctioned way to deal with loan-words (described in more detail in The Complete Lojban Language, Chapter 4.7) is to stick a gismu (minus its final letter) in front of the word, showing what sort of thing the word is; and to put an r (or, if an r is already there, an n) between the gismu and the word. The gismu helps the reader or listener, who has likely never seen this word before, guess what the word might be. This is particularly handy if the source word might be ambiguous between two different meanings. And the combination of gismu minus final vowel, source word (which should start with a consonant, and end with a vowel), and r or n will hopefully produce a cluster of consonants crunchy enough that it cannot be mistaken for another Lojban word or phrase. Tip: There is no standard consonant to put in front of the word to become a fu'ivla if it starts with a vowel. Two popular choices are x and n. Similarly, there is no set convention on where to get the vowel from, if your word ends in a consonant. In these lessons, we'll just repeat the preceding vowel; e.g. England gugdrninglanda (from gugde ‘country’). So what does all this look like in practice? Well, we've already seen curry:
(The consonant cluster is also crunchy enough to be difficult to pronounce; the r is a syllable on its own, and the word should sound something like shidgerrrrrkari). Loan words (in Lojban, fu'ivla) are still only sporadically used — particularly because, as of this writing at least, there is no Lojban dictionary where a standard list of them can be looked up. The problem of which language to borrow words from is also hard to settle, and the choices made can cause problems of their own. The most international solution for plant and animal names, for example, is Latin, and in particular the Latin of the Linnaean system of classification. But this means that, to come up with a word for ‘catnip’, say, you have to know Latin and your Linnaean taxonomy. (Or, like I did, look it up on the Internet — but you can't normally do that while you're having a conversation.) So fu'ivla are still largely unexplored terrain in Lojban. Note: That said, you will occasionally see ‘Stage 4' fu'ivla in use. The fu'ivla we've seen are ‘Stage 3'; in Stage 4, you drop the initial ‘crunchy’ rafsi, reasoning that the word should already be well-known or recognisable enough — and making sure that the word still doesn't look like a normal brivla. (For example, The Complete Lojban Language suggests tci'ile for ‘Chile’, instead of gugdrtcile.) Not everyone likes them, so they're not yet all that common, and you'll usually get plenty of warning if someone is using them.
P.S.: If you were wondering, by the way: cirlrbri, zgiknroknrolo, zgiknroko. Other types of anaphorahe and sheSeveral letters have a defined meaning, a type of thing that it refers to, reliably. By adding a suffix xoi to the right of them we get corresponding pronouns that refer back to the most recent living thing, the most recent person, object, abstract thing and many more. The letters are based on the first letter of some gismu to make them easier to remember. Below is a list of possible referents.
Let us look at some of the amazing things we can do with this.
rixireTo refer to the next-to-last noun, the third-from-last sumti, and so on, ri may be subscripted using the particle xi:
Here rixire, or ri-Number 2, skips la .rik. to reach lo forca. In the same way, riximu, or ri-Number 5, skips la .alis., rixire, la rik., and lo forca to reach lo smuci. As can clearly be seen, this procedure is barely practicable in writing, and would break down totally in speech. That's why we have ra. ko'aNow there are plenty of KOhA sumti to go around. In fact, if you've run out of words by getting to ko'u, you can start over again with fo'a, fo'e ... fo'u. There is a problem, though: you have to remember (a) which sumti was assigned to which KOhA word, and (b) to assign the sumti in the first place. There's nothing to say that this will not become commonplace in future Lojban usage. Right now, however, there is a feeling that this is a little too calculated to work spontaneously. And Lojban cannot readily use the little hints natural languages pepper their grammar with (like gender and number), to keep track of who is who. As a result, yet another strategy has been introduced to refer back to sumti. This strategy dates back from ‘Institute’ Loglan, before Lojban arose in its modern form. (Yes, Lojban has a history and a prehistory. No, we don't really have the time to go into them here.) Assigning pronounsIf we're telling a story in English, the meaning of, say, she keeps changing. At the moment, it means ‘Alice’, but if Alice's friend Jasmine walks into the bar, she could very well mean start meaning ‘Jasmine’. In Lojban, we can keep on using lo go'i, ri and their relatives, but there is an easier way of dealing with a larger cast of characters. What we do is assign pro-sumti as and when we need them, using the cmavo goi (which is like the Latin word sive, or the English also known as (aka)). The sumti assigned by goi are a series called KOhA, consisting of ko'a, ko'e, ko'i ... you get the idea? Note for lawyers (and frustrated non-lawyers): The equivalent in legal documents of goi is henceforth referred to as, and ko'a is something like the party of the first part. Lojban has in fact been proposed as the ideal language for law, where precision is of utmost importance. It would also allow non-lawyers to understand legal documents, which would be something of a miracle. OK, let's go back to Alice's story. We start by saying
This means that from now on, every time we use ko'a, we mean ‘Alice’. The man she sees can then be ko'e, so we say
Now every time we use ko'e, it means that particular man, so the full story so far reads:
(Note how the cus have disappeared: ko'a, like mi, doesn't need them, since it can't join with a selbri to form a new selbri). Assigning ko'e to lo nanmu is actually better than starting the next sentence with lo nanmu. This is because lo nanmu simply means the thing I have in mind which I call ‘man’, which is not exactly the same as the man (it could, in theory, be something totally different). Some Lojbanists might even say that using lo like this is a bit malglico. (Or at least malrarbau ‘damned natural languages’: lots of languages have definite articles, and Lojban lo is no definite article). Tip: If you combine ko'a/ko'e/ko'i/ko'o/ko'u with ri/ra/ru, don't count ko'a-type pro-sumti when you're counting back. For example
Let's continue by introducing Alice's friend Jasmine (if people are wondering where I get all these unusual names from, Jasmine is an old Gujarati friend of mine). We continue ....
mo'ine'i is another space ‘tense’. mo'i indicates movement; ne'i means ‘inside’ (from the gismu, nenri). So mo'ine'i corresponds to the English preposition into (while ne'i on its own corresponds to inside or in.) The way Lojban grammar works, mo'ine'i on its own is treated as mo'ine'i ku: a preposition with an omitted sumti. (Remember caku, which is exactly the same. Just as baku means ‘afterwards’ (relative to the here-and-now), mo'ine'i [ku] means something like ‘in(to)wards' — but is nowhere near as weird in Lojban as it is in English). mo'i is extremely useful, as it allows you to distinguish between location and motion. For example, I ran behind the bar in English is properly speaking ambiguous: are you running while behind the bar, or are you running with your final destination behind the bar? Lojban does not allow that ambiguity: mi bajra ti'a lo barja means the former, while mi bajra mo'i ti'a lo barja means the latter. In the example given above, ne'i klama would mean not that Jasmine comes in (from outside), but that she is going from somewhere to somewhere else, while inside. This kind of ambiguity may pass unnoticed by native English speakers, but speakers of languages which are more precise about direction find it extremely vague (Turkish, for example, has at least three words to translate ‘here’). bo for linking sentencesbo has another use, which seems separate from selbri grouping: It can also bind a sumtcita to an entire bridi, so that the content of the sumtcita is not a sumti, but the following bridi. This is best explained with an example. More interjectionsOne final thing: if you want to know how someone feels about something, once again Lojban provides a fill-in-the-slot question word. The word asking the listener to fill in the interjection that best applies is pei. You can fill pei in with any interjection or sei-phrase. So if I ask you pei can also explicitly ask for NAI or CAI alone, by following a UI cmavo. So a response to
could well be ru'e: Kinda... Then again, it could also be naicai: Absolutely not, and I shall thank you never to mention it in my presence again. (Allowing for some latitude in translation..). Note: selma'o UI4 specifies what ‘part’ of you is feeling the emotion — whether it is a physical, social, mental response, and so on. selma'o UI5 has some ‘left-over’ modifiers; we already saw in passing ga'i, which indicates haughtiness. Time journeysHow can I say "broda from morning to evening"? I doubt {broda co'a lo cerni co'u lo vanci} would work? <latro`a> while I would say that, it is indeed wrong, because it says "the event of brodaing ending, which happens at the evening, begins at the morning" <latro`a> that is, the co'a tag scopes over the co'u tag, while you want them at the same scope level; as far as I know there's nothing that can be done about this with tag syntax <latro`a> you can, however, say, {lo nu broda cu cfari ca lo cerni gi'e se fanmo ca lo vanci} <danr> it might be a bit too formal for my purposes. I'm considering {broda fi'o cfari lo cerni fi'o fanmo lo vanci} <latro`a_> same problem. {fi'o} has the same scope phenomena <tsani> you can use termsets to give terms equal scope <tsani> {.i broda co'a ko'a ce'e co'u ko'e} Vocatives
mekso saskeLikewise, you can attach a sumtcita: le nu darxi kei be gau do: “The event of hitting, which is caused by you”. Note that the presence or absence of kei makes it parse differently: With the fa'orma'o present, be attaches to nu, without the fa'orma'o, it attaches to darxi. So it decides what is being emphasised: Is the hitting, or the event of hitting caused by you? In this specific case, though, that's just about the same thing. famyma'o Warning!: One could have description nouns inside description nouns, saying le le se cinjikca be mi ku gerku, = le gerku pe le se cinjikca be mi =“the dog of the man I'm flirting with”, but that's not very easy to read (or to understand when spoken), and is often being avoided. One need also to learn tu'a, since it will make a lot of sentences much easier. It takes a sumti and converts it to another sumti - an elliptical abstraction which has something to do with the first sumti. For example, I could saymi djica lo nu mi citka lo plise, or I could let it be up to context what abstraction about the apple I desire and just say mi djica tu'a lo plise. One always has to guess what abstraction the speaker means by tu'a SUMTI, so it should only be used when context makes it easy to guess. Another example: gasnu “x1 does/brings about x2 (volition not implied)” za'a do gasnu tu'a lo skami - “I see that you make the computer do something”. Officially, tu'a SUMTI is equivalent to le su'u SUMTI co'e. Vague, but useful. There are situations where you cannot use tu'a, even though it would seem suitable. These situations are when I don't want the resulting sumti to be an abstraction, but a concrete sumti. In this case, one can use zo'e pe. tu'a convert sumti to vague abstraction involving the sumti. Equivalent to le su'u SUMTI co'e kei ku Finally, one kind of sumti can be turned into another by the words of the class LAhE. lu'a -Convert individual(s)/mass/sequence/set to individuals. lu'i - Convert individual(s)/mass/sequence/set to a set. lu'o - Convert individual(s)/mass/sequence/set to mass. vu'i - Convert individual(s)/mass/sequence/set to sequence; the order is not stated. The use of these words is straight-forwardly: Placing them before a sumti of a certain type makes a new sumti of a new type. Notice, though, that as a fourth kind of sumti, a sequence has been introduced. This is not used very often (it doesn't have its own gadri, for instance), but just included here for completion. The last two members of LAhE do not convert between types of sumti, but allows you to speak of a a sumti by only mentioning something which references to it: If one sumti A refers to a sumti B, for instance because sumti A is a title of a book, or a name, or a sentence (which always refer to something, at least a bridi), ‘'la'e SUMTI A refers to sumti B. For instance, ‘'mi nelci la'e di'ufor “I like what you just said” (not mi nelci di'u which just means "I like your previous sentence") or ‘'la'e le cmalu noltru for the book “The Little Prince”, and not some little prince himself. The cmavo ‘'lu'e does the exact reverse – ‘'lu'e SUMTI refers to an object which refers to the sumti. la'e - “the thing referred to by” - extracts a sumti A from a sumti B which refers to A. lu'e - “the thing referring to” - extracts a sumti B from a sumti A, when B refers to A. In order to clarify that all tenses are relative to the speaker's current position, the wordnau can be used at any time. Another word, ki marks a tense which is then considered the new standard. That will be taught way later. nau updates temporal and spacial frame of reference to the speaker's current 'here and now'. In the Lojban tense system, all tenses are prepositions, which we have conveniently just made ourselves familiar with. Okay okay, technically, tenses are slightly different from other prepositions, but this difference is almost insignificant, and won't be explained until later. In most aspects they are like all other prepositions; they are terminated by ku, making it explicit that selma'o (the group) PU is terminated by ku.
For example, if we see cu in a sentence, we know that what is coming up is a selbri; so the sumti before it must now be over. So we can drop theku. (In fact, that's why cu exists in the first place: the beginning of a verb is a much more important structural break in natural languages than the end of a noun.) If a new sentence is beginning — as signalled by perhaps the most distinctively Lojbanic word, the ‘audible punctuation’ .i — then (have we covered .i yet?) there can be no more sumti from the old sentence; so we drop the vau. In fact, it is only in situations of potential ambiguity, like the sentence we've been looking at, that you'll get terminators appearing in normal Lojban usage at all. Note: Remember those pesky possessive constructions from Lesson 3, when you couldn't flip lo tamne pe lo ninmu klama the other way around, because it was ambiguous? All you need is ku to resolve that ambiguity: lo lo ninmu klama ku tamne means 'the woman traveller's cousin', and lo lo ninmu ku klama tamne means ‘the woman's traveller cousin.’
Still, most Lojbanists think the flip-around is not worth the hassle of inserting that bothersome ku, so you rarely see it used when the ‘possessor’ sumti is not a one-word sumti. (ping!) cmeneThe final point is stress. As we've seen, Lojban words are stressed on the penultimate syllable, and if a name has different stress, we use capital letters. This means that the English and French names Robert come out differently in Lojban: the English name is.robyt. in UK English, or .rab,rt. in some American dialects, but the French is.roBER. . To give an idea of how all this works, here are some names of famous people in their own language and in Lojban.
tanruThe default grouping in Lojban is leftwards. This means that, if you have three things connected together in Lojban, the first two go together before you join in the third. For example, la .jasmin. je la .alis. jonai la .ranjit means not Jasmine and either Alice or Ranjeet, but Either Jasmine and Alice, or Ranjeet. Does the distinction matter? Depends on your background; programmers, for example, are often driven to distraction in making sure their logical connectives work out in the right order (usually by copious use of brackets.) But there is often a real difference in meaning; the first interpretation given above describes a couple, for example, but the second doesn't. melbi cmalu ractu kevna Tatoeba-like. Examples of diff.wordsNote: To assume that Lojban works like English in general is a sin Lojbanists are ever on the alert for. It is enough of a community obsession that the Lojban word for it —malglico - damned English — routinely turns up in the English of Lojbanists, even when they're not talking about Lojban. In this instance, it is malglico to assume that ninmu refers to an adult. This is very Lojbanic — the English word good on its own is so vague as to be almost meaningless. It is also slightly malglico to put a person in the x1 place, which is normally filled by an object, state or event. For ‘morally good’ you would usually use vrude ‘virtuous’.
How many sumti can a selbri describe? The number depends on the place structure of the word we use for the selbri. (There are ways of tagging on extra sumti, which we'll cover in later lessons). See jutsi! SpaceRemember the word ti? This is part of a series ti, ta, tu, meaning roughly ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘that over there.’ If we're talking about places rather than things, we say vi, va, vu, meaning roughly ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘yonder’ or ‘way over there’. Again, this is determined by the thing you're talking about. If you're telling a doctor where you feel pain, ti might be the end of your toe, while if you're talking about astronomy, ti could be the solar system. We can therefore say There is a whole class of cmavo that work like ri'u, and they are called FAhA-type cmavo, so named after a (somewhat non-representative) member of their class, fa'a (in the direction of). These include to'o (away from), zo'i (to the same side as), zu'a (to the left of), ne'a (next to), ne'i (within) and so on. (Again, all the space cmavo are explained in Chapter 10 of The Complete Lojban Language). Note: FAhA cmavo indicate direction, but not motion toward that direction. There is a separate cmavo for that; see Lesson 7. Getting back to daily speech, these time and space cmavo are very useful for questions. ca ma is ‘simultaneous with what?', or in other words, ‘when?' (a simpler alternative to ti'u or di'e). Similarly, vi ma means ‘at the location of what?', or ‘where?' Restrictive and non-restrictive relative clausesCombine the following pairs of sentences into single sentences. In each case, make the second sentence a relative clause modifying the underlined noun in the first sentence. The highlighted noun in the second sentence is the same as that in the first, and will turn into ke'a. You may omit ke'a if possible. Example:
Watch out for vau which you may have to insert.
swadeshNouns animal ashes bark (of a tree) belly bird blood bone child (young) cloud day (not night) dog dust ear earth (soil) egg eye fat (substance) father feather (large) fire fish flower fog foot fruit grass guts hair hand head heart hold (inhand) husband ice lake leg liver long louse man (male) meat (flesh) moon mother mountain mouth name narrow neck night nose person river road root rope salt sand sea (ocean) skin (ofperson) sky smoke snake snow star stick (of wood) stone sun tail tongue tooth (front) tree water wife wind (breeze) wing woman woods worm year Verbs to blow (wind) to breathe to burn (intransitive) to come to count to cut to die to dig to drink to eat to fall (drop)far to fear to bite to fight to float to flow to fly to freeze to give to hear to hit to hunt (game) to kill to know (facts) to laugh to lie (onside) to live to play to pull to push to rain to rub to say to scratch (itch) to see to seed to sew to sing to sit to sleep to smell (perceive odor) to spit to split to squeeze to stab (or stick) to stand to suck to swell to swim to think to throw to tie to turn (veer) to vomit to walk to wash to wipe Adjectives back bad big cold (weather) dirty dry (substance) dull (knife) few good heavy here many near new old other red right (correct) right (hand) rotten (log) sharp (knife) short small smooth straight thick thin warm (weather) wet wide Pronouns he I we they thou/you Conjunctions and because if with (accompanying) Prepositions at in Numbers five four one three two Question how what when where who Particles Not Colours black white yellow
Basic vocabShould be completely inside the course.
Free lunch coming.'Lojban for Beginners' will meet you under a new name. In better taste. In less complexity. Stay tuned! Free lunch coming.'The Crash Course in Lojban'. A classical work under a fresh name. 'Lojban for Beginners' redesigned to meet the new demands from the world community. A better quality, a slimmer design. Lojban as it is in year 2015. Got your freebie pdf yet? Just click it. http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=L17-01 The original idea by Robin Turner. Initially revised by Nick Nicholas, the first fluent speaker of Lojban on the planet. Reworked by La Gleki with the help of Lojbanic community throughout year 2014. Just one click away! http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=L17-01 Let the magic start here! About the bookThis textbook is or will be further inspired by: Lojban textbook in Wikibooks, BASIC English, gua\spi, Pandunia lessons, toki pona with it's textbook, Sesperanto, Conceptual Semantic Categories of Lojban gismu, Viku lessons, Loglan3 textbook, Glosa textbook, Simple-E from Lognet'99, survival lingvo, Easy Loglan (Introduction and Description),N-paradigm, Standard Average European, Tok Pisin for beginners, Conlanger's Thesaurus, Introduction to Ceqli adapted for Lojban. poi problemsAnother method is to replace lo with zo'e and attach any number of relative clauses connecting them with je:
You can use da/de/di if it is not used otherwise in the sentence (remember that the grammar of da and zo'e differs):
ke'aWe used ke'a in
This ke'a replaces lo be mi mensi in the relative clause. So ke'a is used in order not to repeat lo be mi mensi twice. We can't even use ri here instead of ke'a since ri refers to the last finished noun and then noun lo be mi mensi is not finished yet, since the relative clause is a part of the noun to which it is attached. ra would be okay but it isn't particularly precise. po and po'epe and ne are used as loose association only, like saying lo stizu pe mi — my chair about a chair which you sit on. It's not really yours, but has something to do with you. There is just a relationshop between the two nouns.
If you want to say something is specific to that noun you can use po instead of pe. lo gerku pe la alis can be applied to a street dog that Alice likes to play with. But lo gerku po la alis can be applied only to a dog that, for example, was bought for her by her parents. In many cases people prefer to use pe which is more vague rather than po.
Lastly, po'e is used for innate, intrinsic connections.
As you can see, in many cases the second place of verb makes po'e unnecessary. Because of all of that pe is used very frequent compared to po and po'e. Resume. We have:
L17-02ti o ta
more about be and relative clausesHow would we say You talked to my sister — the one who doesn't like Ricky Martin — about economics? Let's take it by steps:
Notice that it is possible to move be mi to the left of the verb mensi. This allows to attach poi to lo be mi mensi. In lo mensi be mi poi... the word poi will attach to mi: the sister of me who (I) .... Also notice that we need to close the relative clause with vau so that lo dinske belongs to the main verb of our clause: tavla, not the verb nelci inside the relative clause. Otherwise, lo dinske would be a noun of nelci and not tavla — which is not really what you want. Here's another example:
Here we can't attach poi berti lo tcadu (that is to the north of the city) to lo gusta as lo kisto doesn't allow us to do that. We also can't move lo kisto to the left as lo kisto gusta would create a a compound verb (tanru). In this case we just repeat poi twice so that the second poi attaches to lo gusta. To attach two or more relative clauses use je (and) to connect them, since both clauses are supposed to be true. For example,
As an event follows du'i in this example du'i is applied to the whole event of the clause. If the preposition is based on a verb whose x2 is an event then the preposition is applied to the whole clause where it resides: du'i is based on dunli — to be equal to. We can compare only objects with objects and events with events. Since an event is attached to du'i it is appliedю selmahoParticles (cmavo) are short words like lo, cu, je, pu, ca, ba, mi, do, ti. They can be divided by their meaning and function into groups that are called selma'o. E.g. pu, ca, ba belong to the group PU. This is just an illustration, there is no need in memorizing the names of selma'o. But it's convenient to memorize them by those groups. klamaWell, here is the full definition of klama:
So
Time of day<--Let's imagine, though, that the time is not ten past eleven, but ten to eleven. We can say li pa no pi'e pano (10:50), but we can also say li pa pa pi'e ni'u pano, where ni'u is the Lojban minus sign (for negative numbers, not for subtraction) — what we are saying is 11:−10. For half past eleven we can also use pi and say li pa pa pimu 11.5. I don't particularly like this method, but it is perfectly good Lojban. If we are using numbers for times, it is normal to use the 24-hour system, so 6 PM is li pa bi (18:00).--> tails23:32 < durka42> gerna: broda gi'e ca da brode 23:32 < gerna> not grammatical: broda gi'e ca _da_ ⚠ brode 23:33 < zahlman> what were you trying to express? 23:33 < durka42> ko'a ge broda gi ca da brode 23:35 < durka42> I thought the tag shouldn't interact with the connective unless I used {gi'ecabo} which I didn't 23:38 < zahlman> gerna mi ca da broda 23:38 < gerna> (0[{mi <ca da>} CU {broda VAU}])0 23:38 < zahlman> notice that {ca da} is not part of the selbri here 23:38 < zahlman> gi'e connects bridi-tails, so they have to start with selbri. member vs. full set10:04 < latro`a> gleki: I think in the gismu themselves, it is best if these are polymorphic 10:04 < latro`a> then you can specify later 10:05 < latro`a> unfortunately this does lead to odd interaction with quantifiers, because polymorphic selbri really are polyvalent 10:05 < latro`a> so {mi po'o se bangu la lojban} makes sense for one of the manifestations of {bangu} 10:06 < latro`a> in haskell this problem is solved by the typechecker: a polymorphic function comes with a dictionary that maps values of the variable input types to implementations 10:07 < latro`a> for example, if I define "f x = 3*x+1", I get a function that carries around a dictionary that tells it to use (*) and (+) from Int if x is an Int, from Double if x is a Double, etc. 10:08 < latro`a> it'd be interesting if we could somehow implement something like this 10:08 < latro`a> but we probably can't, which means you really shouldn't use quantifiers in polymorphic places 10:16 < latro`a> I suppose to a limited extent this could be done with SE, though this would get rather cumbersome if we had more distinctions than distributive/nondistributive and exhaustive/nonexhaustive 10:17 < latro`a> or NAhE 10:24 < gleki> latro`a: what should i use {poi se gunma} and {poi cmima}? 10:24 < latro`a> that's not enough, unfortunately, you have to tweak the selbri instead 10:25 < latro`a> because this isn't really about the type of the argument 10:25 < latro`a> skina with skina4=nonexhaustive and skina with skina4=exhaustive are different predicates 10:25 < gleki> to tweak? how? 10:26 < gleki> for skina i can say {mi catlu lo skina} 10:26 < latro`a> NAhE or SE are the syntax you want 10:26 < gleki> but about the other cases? 10:26 < latro`a> I'm imagining a NAhE for "x1 is exhaustive" 10:26 < latro`a> then "x2 is exhaustive" is {se NAhE* se} 10:26 < gleki> "this is a language of French people" = ko'a bangu lo fraso 10:27 < gleki> "this is a language of some French people (my friends)" = ko'a bangu lo fraso 10:27 < gleki> how to distinguish them? 10:30 < gleki> seriously i understood nothin from ur proposal 10:33 < latro`a> ko'a se NAhE* se bangu mi == ko'a is a language of me exclusively 10:33 < latro`a> where NAhE* is a new NAhE 10:33 < latro`a> this is a bit stronger than the {po'o} version 10:44 < Ilmen> coi. What do you mean by «exhaustive»? 10:48 < gleki> cipra: ko'a se na'e se bangu mi 10:48 < cipra> (ko'a [CU {se <na'e (¹se bangu¹)>} {mi VAU}]) 10:53 < gleki> that would be nice ofc. to have them polymorphic but then what would be the difference between cmima and se gunma? ;) 10:59 < latro`a> cmima isn't really a thing in post-set jbo 10:59 < gleki> what is it then? 10:59 < latro`a> cmima? 10:59 < gleki> yes 10:59 < latro`a> it's the way you refer to sets 10:59 < latro`a> which we don't use 11:00 < gleki> so now we dont need {cmima} gismu at all? 11:00 < latro`a> not really no 11:00 < latro`a> se gunma is mass membership 11:00 < gleki> So "I am a member of this committee" would be ... 11:00 < gleki> en: kamni 11:00 < mensi> kamni = x1 (mass) is a committee with task/purpose x2 of body x3. |>>> Board of directors/trustees/cabinet (= trukamni, gritrukamni). See also bende, kagni. |>>> noralujv 11:01 < gleki> would be what? 11:02 < latro`a> mi se gunma ti noi kamni 11:02 < Ilmen> So, what is an exhaustive tersu'i? Do you mean things like gunma2 which doesn't require to list all the members of the mass? 11:02 < latro`a> being literal 11:02 < latro`a> maybe this will help 11:02 < gleki> latro`a: do you think i should remove {cmima} from my analog of L4B ? 11:02 < latro`a> mi se gunma mi joi do 11:02 < latro`a> mi na se NAhE* se gunma mi joi do 11:03 < latro`a> mi jo'u do se NAhE* se gunma mi joi do 11:03 < latro`a> this also gives you a way to extract the individual-blob from a mass, provided that makes sense 11:03 < gleki> why {na} in the first sentence? 11:03 < latro`a> {lo se NAhE* se gunma be ...} is unambiguously all of the individuals inside, in one lo-blob 11:04 < gleki> could u at least give translations? 11:04 < latro`a> {mi se gunma mi joi do} = I am a member of the mass {mi joi do} 11:04 < Ilmen> What means {lo ro se gunma be ko'a}? 11:07 < latro`a> {mi na NAhE* se gunma mi joi do} = I do not satisfy "x1 (individuals) is the collection of all individual members of x2" 11:05 < latro`a> it is a slightly more vague version of the same thing 11:05 < latro`a> "all of the members of ko'a that we are talking about" 11:05 < latro`a> but we might not be talking about *all* of them 11:05 < latro`a> this NAhE* is sort of an explicit UD-twiddler 11:06 < gleki> this is one of the three questions that stop me from completing a new gimste with examples, te sumti interactions, variable types, blackjack and hookers 11:06 < latro`a> {lo ro ve skina} may not contain the entire audience of the film, because we might just be talking about a small group of friends that watch movies together 11:07 < Ilmen> To me, skina4 is the *intended* audience, not the people who actually watch skina1 11:07 < Ilmen> ie pei 11:07 < gleki> as for "intended" te sumti this is actually my second question :D 11:07 < latro`a> to me that's the exhaustive skina4, but I regularly use ve skina for "watch" 11:08 < latro`a> I do not really like kinzga necessary and sufficient13:38 < Ilmen> does banzunu = se sarcu? 13:41 < latro`a> this is muddled by classical logic shenanigans 13:41 < latro`a> in classical logic, p => q (that is, ~p v q) is the same as p |- q 13:41 < latro`a> the latter is "one can infer q from p" 13:42 < latro`a> this is the definition of |-, more or less 13:43 < latro`a> in general necessary/sufficient is about |-, not => 13:43 < latro`a> and |- is different in nonclassical logics, and is also different in human discourse 13:44 < Ilmen> So in this paradigm sufficiency is janai? 13:45 < latro`a> in classical logic, "p is sufficient for q" is "p => q", which is to say "p na ja q" 13:45 < latro`a> while "p is necessary for q" is "p <= q" which is to say "p ja nai q" 13:45 < Ilmen> What about the lojban "sarcu", should it be a mere logical connective, or should it express causation? 13:46 < latro`a> in human discourse, |- is more complicated than any simple logical operator 13:46 < latro`a> because we do not say "if the sky is red then mars is blue" 13:46 < latro`a> even though under the classical definitions this is true 13:46 < Ilmen> I'm not very familiar with |-. It's a metalogical operator? 13:46 < latro`a> |- is inference 13:47 < latro`a> xatra: tell Ilmen the name for the symbol |- in english is "turnstile" 13:47 < latro`a> bah 13:48 < latro`a> Ilmen: the name for the symbol |- in english is "turnstile" 13:48 < Ilmen> got disconnected .oi 13:48 < Ilmen> did I miss something? 13:48 < latro`a> Ilmen: the name for the symbol |- in english is "turnstile" 13:51 < Ilmen> je'e 13:51 < Ilmen> So, what {sarcu} means? 13:52 < latro`a> there's causality there, definitely 13:52 < latro`a> but it's event-causality 13:53 < Ilmen> nibli is more a sufficient condition or a necessary conditiont? 13:53 < latro`a> nibli is "x1 is logically sufficient for x2" 13:53 < Ilmen> ba'a ie 13:54 < Ilmen> {banzunu} is the sufficient version of sarcu 13:55 < Ilmen> We lack a necessary-nibli 13:55 < Ilmen> ja'o 13:59 < Ilmen> X sarcu Y = lonu X tolfau cu banzunu lonu Y tolfau (if I'm not mistaken) take any apple (not more than one)14:01 < menli> {lo ro plise goi ko'a zo'u ge ro da poi me ko'a zo'u do zifre lo ka lebna da gi ko'oi do lebna pa ko'a} -- what's wrong with this? Lojban doesn't force you to use any particular philosophy, religion or political beliefs. Explain naiUnlike when used after verbs and pronouns nai after interjections means not just "no" but the opposite attitude. But explain after BAI Variable types12:32 <@xalbo> Some object/event places are events with possible raising, but some (what I've called Objects of Cognition) really aren't. Although those hold a lot more than just object/event. 12:34 < zahlman> "objects of cognition"? 12:38 < menli> For example, zmadu-1&2, drata-1&2, melbi-1, simsa-1&2 have no requirement on the sumti type 12:42 <@xalbo> pensi2 is the prototype OoC, for me. Similarly, melbi1. "Anything the human mind can conceive of and opine about." 12:43 <@xalbo> {zmadu} is a more complicated thing, since zmadu1 and zmadu2 do have some more restrictions (namely, that they're both compatible with the open place in the zmadu3) spisa - pagbu
da14:07 <@xalbo> I think the point isn't that {ci da plise} is talking about three apples, it's saying that the number of apples is three. "How many apples are there?" "Three". 14:07 < mukti> So not to derail the goatlegging, but earlier I asked about whether {ro} performs existential import. The consensus seemed to be that it does not. Does this mean "The problem of 'any'" section in CLL needs an update? {ro da poi klama le zarci cu cadzu le foldi} is read to say "in fact, there are people who go to the store", and more to the point: "Lojban universal claims always imply the corresponding existential claims as wel 14:07 < mukti> l" 14:07 < selpahi> The thing is that {da} does not really make reference. If you pick out three from among the five which are all in the same place, it is pretty hard to argue that the other two are not in the domain. So I'd suggest {le} or {lo} here 14:07 < ldlework> selpahi: I think the problem is that I define the UoC with my speech 14:07 < ldlework> The state of the world, objectively, doesn't. 14:08 <@xalbo> mukti: Huh, I hadn't realized that CLL came down firmly on the side of existential import like that. Very interesting. 14:08 < selpahi> mukti: Yes, this is a known problem 14:08 < mukti> xalbo: I feel very silly asking the kinds of questions that I am today. Yeah. 14:08 < mukti> selpahi: Good to know. 06:43 < mukti> "I want to marry any rich woman" is different from either the specific or non-specific reading of "I want to marry a rich woman" 06:44 < gleki> is the second da poi ricfu ninmu cu jai se djica mi fai lo ka mi se speni 06:44 < gleki> ? 06:47 < gleki> then the first is {ro ricfu ninmu ka'e jai se djica .. 06:48 < menli> {mi djica lo nu mi speni pa da poi ricfu gi'e ninmu} vs {pa da poi ricfu gi'e ninmu zo'u mi djica lo nu mi speni da} Fixed issues
L17-05 - NO FIX issuesIndefinite articlesIn English we say "a table" and "an egg". The "a" and "an" are indefinite articles. Lojban does not use indefinite articles. It is enough to say lo sovda for egg or "an" egg; lo jubme for table or "a" table, and so on, when referring to "some unspecified" egg or table, or "any" egg or table. The definite article "the", used to specify a particular object being discussed, is replacing lo to le lo fetsi - a female, le fetsi - the female or just she (a specific female, the one we are discussing). Other vocativesco'o is the farewell word, corresponding to Goodbye, Farewell. Lojbanists signing off on e-mail often end with something like co'o mi'e .bob. — this is equivalent to putting your name at the end of your email in English as a signature, and translates as Goodbye; I'm Bob.
Vocatives take nouns after them. However, the rule is that you can drop lo making it more vague:
12:40 < gocti> va'o su'o cipra gerna cu cmavo ma'oi ui :p 12:42 < phma> ""do mo ra'o? — tavla mi"" is equivalent to ""do mo? — do tavla mi"" 12:42 < phma> and here's my example of no'a ra'o: 12:43 < gocti> ua 12:43 < phma> la .djan. klama le zdani be vo'a pu le nu la .meris. no'a 12:43 < phma> John went to John's house before Mary did 12:44 < phma> la .djan. klama le zdani be vo'a pu le nu la .meris. no'a ra'o 12:44 < phma> John went home before Mary did 12:44 < phma> In the second sentence Mary went to Mary's house. In the first, she went to John's."
place here issues for which CC can function without solving them:
Here, ro refers to the year
And here are the names of months of Gregorian calendar: <tab class=wikitable head=top> English name Lojban name meaning January lo pagmese 1st month February lo regmese 2nd month March lo cigmese 3rd month April lo vogmese 4th month May lo mugmese 5th month June lo xagmese 6th month July lo zegmese 7th month August lo bigmese 8th month September lo sogmese 9th month October lo daugmese 10th month November lo feigmese 11th month December lo gaigmese 12th month </tab> It is easier to remember them if you notice that they the first letters remind of numbers. Thus, January is the first month and start with pa (1) and so on. Calendars in other culturesThe names of days of the week and months match international standards. However, there can be a need to describe conventions for cultures which for example do not use a seven-day week. In ordinary speech you are free to create compound verbs for that. For example, you can call the first month of classical Chinese calendar as lo jungo pavma'i (literally Chinese January although the first month in the original Chinese calendar rather starts in February). And lo jungo pavdei could be the first day of the Chinese ten-day week. (jungo means x1 is Chinese). The same logic can be applied if the seasons where you live don't match this pattern. For example, the rainy season or monsoon could be lo carvi citsi (from carvi = rain, and citsi = season). Here are some I made up for fun to give a better idea of the weather in Britain:
Later in this course we'll see how to create new words in the form of lujvo and zi'evla and those words will have precise meanings and thus become terms. You'll actually need a pretty good knowledge of Lojban to make up lujvo on the spot, but we'll learn how to make some simple lujvo later on in this course. aspectsWe can also contrast do ca ze'i pu klama with do pu ze'i ca klama. The first event of traveling has one endpoint in the present and extends a little towards the past, while the second event has one endpoint in the past and extends only to the present (that is, slighty into the past or future) of that endpoint.
Note that mi ba tavla is similar to mi pu'o tavla, and likewise with ba'o and pu. Why do they seem reversed in sounding? Because event contours view the present as seen from the point of the process, whereas the other tenses view events seen from the present.
Most of the time, though, processes actually end at their natural ending; this is what makes it natural. Trains are not usually late, and people usually retrain themselves to eat only edible food. To convert de'a/di'a to space use fe'e. All event contours in one diagram:
Vertical line signifies the time for the natural beginning and natural end of an event. Horizontal lines show the event contours. What would .o'onai ri'u nu lo prenu cu darxi lo gerku pu mean?
Answer: (Anger!) To the right (of something, probably me) and in the past (of some event), something is an event of a person beating a dog. or A man hit a dog to my right!
pu'o needs to be demonstrated by an example. What does .ui mi pu'o se zdani mean? Answer: Yay, I'll begin to have a home.
What does .ui mi pu zi ze'u jmive mean? Answer:
Just to underline the similarity with spacial tenses, let's have another example, this time with spacial tenses:
In Lojban, we also operate with an event's natural beginning and its natural end. The term natural is highly subjective in this sense, and the natural end refers to the point in the process where it should end. You can say about a late train, for instance, that its process of reaching you is now extending beyond its natural end. An undercooked, but served meal, similarly, is being eaten before the natural beginning of the process. PrecedenceWe should be able from that to say
Right? Actually, no we can't: bo has the function of connecting sentences through prepositions, because it connects sentences on its own. And when it does, it connects them tighter than .i je does. This means that .i se ni'i bo connects only to the immediately preceding sentence — not to the preceding sentence pair! So Fluffy's death is presented as a consequence of rabbits not living long — not a consequence of both rabbits not living long and Fluffy being a rabbit. However, if we put the two clauses in a single sentence, then none of this is an issue: the conclusion will attach to both clauses, but will still attach to a single sentence:
There is also a forethought conjunction for compound verbs: these are gu'a, gu'e, gu'o, gu'u. And the second compound part is connected with gi. So if we want to say that Alice fancies men that are, if funny, then also handsome, the afterthought version is
To make this slightly (but only slightly!) more comprehensible, we can put this in forethought mode:
There are no forethought versions of clause tail conjunctions. In practice, however, two clauses connected by ge can be clause tails just as easily as a full clause: there is no real distinction in meaning between the two. Situation: "My garden"
A similar set of examples with ga'a:
The last sentence is similar to:
Types of nouns: nouns from verbs, la-names and pronounsThere are three types of nouns in Lojban:
So as they mostly work the same way we in Lojban there is one word covering all of them - sumti. Terminology in clausesLet's describe the structure of Lojban clause (bridi). The main verb, or predicate (se bridi or selbri in Lojban) describes relationships of nouns. It can be represented as a single verb word (selbrivla) or as a compound verb (tanru). Here are some examples of nouns and main verbs.
Here ti is a noun and ladru is the main verb consisting of one verb word.
Here lo mlatu is a noun (sumti) and the compound verb sutra pinxe works as the main verb (selbri). Also you can add prepositions (sumtcita) like ca:
So in other words.
or in English
tanru, or compound verbs consist of two or more verb words. Each left verb word is called seltau compared to the right one called tertau. Morphology of verbsVerbs (selbrivla) are divided into 4 groups by their form:
Task. Close the right part of the table. Which of the following Lojban words are selbrivla, cmevla (remember, they always end in a consonant), neither? Note: the full stops are removed in the cmevla below to make the task a bit more tricky.
loNotice that ro lo means each, every (whereas ro means all). Finally, when defining cats with lo it's possible to specify how many of them exist: Template:Lo re mlatu cu pinxe lo ladru
Yes, lo prenu can mean both one person or people (in plural) depending on context. Lojban can be very vague. As one adds more words, the meaning becomes more precise. Finally, we can put a number after lo:
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