cniglic

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Cniglic

Cniglic (SHNEE-gleesh) is a subset of Lojban which I discovered roaming wild in Lojbanistan. I am now trying to tame it & structure it, for use both as an entryway to the full Lojban and as a useful language in its own right. It consists of approximately 93 words:

39 Basic Emotional Scales:

.ai - eye - intent - indecision - rejection/refusal

.au - ow - desire - indifference - reluctance

.a'a - AH-ha - attentive - inattentive - avoiding

.a'e - AH-heh - alertness - exhaustion

.a'i - AH-hee - effort - no special effort - repose

.a'o - AH-ho - hope - despair

.a'u - AH-hoo - interest - disinterest - repulsion

.ei - ey - obligation - freedom

.e'a - EH-ha - granting permission - prohibiting

.e'e - EH-heh - competence - incompetence/inability

.e'i - EH-hee - constraint - indepdendence - challenge/resistance against constraint

.e'o - EH-ho - request - negative request

.e'u - EH-hoo - suggestion - abandon suggest - warning

.ia - ya - belief - skepticism - disbelief

.ie - yeh - agreement - disagreement

.ii - yee - fear - security

.io - yo - respect - disrespect

.iu - yoo - love - no love lost - hatred

.i'a - EE-ha - acceptance - blame

.i'e - EE-heh - approval - non-approval - disapproval

.i'i - EE-hee - togetherness - privacy

.i'o - EE-ho - appreciation - envy

.i'u - EE-hoo - familiarity - mystery

.oi - oy - complaint - pleasure

.o'a - OH-ha - pride - modesty/humility - shame

.o'i - OH-hee - caution - rashness

.o'e - OH-heh - closeness - distance

.o'o - OH-ho - patience - mere tolerance - anger

.o'u - OH-hoo - relaxation - composure - stress

.ua - wa - discovery - confusion/searching

.ue - weh - surprise - not really surprised - expectation

.ui - wee - happiness - unhappiness

.uo - wo - completion - incompleteness

.uu - woo - pity - cruelty

.u'a - OO-ha - gain - loss

.u'e - OO-heh - wonder - commonplace

.u'i - OO-hee - amusement - weariness

.u'o - OO-ho - courage - timidity - cowardice

.u'u - OO-hoo - repentance - innocence - lack of regret

2 Basic Variations:

cu'i - SHOE-hee - neutral midpoint of scale

nai - nigh - opposite end of scale

3 Levels of Intensity:

ru'e - ROO-heh - weak

sai - sigh - strong

cai - shy - extreme

6 Categories:

ro'a - RO-ha - social

ro'e - RO-heh - mental

ro'i - RO-hee - emotional

ro'o - RO-ho - physical

ro'u - RO-hoo - sexual

re'e - REH-heh - spiritual

10 Modifiers:

be'u - BEH-hoo - lack/need - presence/satisfaction - satiation

fu'i - FOO-hee - easy - difficult

ga'i - GA-hee - hauteur - equal rank - meekness

ju'o - ZHOO-ho - certainty - uncertainty - impossibility

le'o - LEH-ho - aggressive - passive - defensive

ri'e - REE-heh - release of emotion - emotion restraint

se'a - SEH-ha - self-sufficiency - dependency

se'i - SEH-hee - self-oriented - other-oriented

vu'e - VOO-heh - virtue - sin

zo'o - ZO-ho - humorously - dully - seriously

6 Structural Words:

bu'o - BOO-ho - start emotion - continue emotion - end emotion

dai - dye - marks empathetic use of preceding attitudinal; shows another's feelings

fu'e - FOO-heh - begin explicit scope

fu'o - FOO-ho - end explicit scope

ge'e - GEH-heh - unspecified emotion

pei - pay - emotion question

11 Evidentials:

ba'a - BA-ha - I expect - I experience - I remember

ca'e - SHA-heh - I define

ja'o - ZHA-ho - I conclude

ju'a - ZHOO-ha - I state - (default) elliptical/non-specific basis

ka'u - KA-hoo - I know by cultural means (myth or custom)

pe'i - PEH-hee - I opine (subjective claim)

ru'a - ROO-ha - I postulate

se'o - SEH-ho - I know by internal experience (dream, vision, or personal revelation)

su'a - SOO-ha - I generalize - I particularize; discursive: abstractly - concretely

ti'e - TEE-heh - I hear (hearsay)

za'a - ZA-ha - I observe

16 Discursives:

ba'u - BA-hoo - exaggeration - accuracy - understatement

da'i - DA-hee - supposing - in fact

do'a - DO-ha - generously - parsimoniously

je'u - ZHEH-hoo - truth - falsity

ke'u - KEH-hoo - repeating - continuing

la'a - LA-ha - probability - improbability

li'a - LEE-ha - clearly - obscurely

mu'a - MOO-ha - for example - omitting - end examples

pa'e - PA-heh - justice - prejudice

ra'u - RA-hoo - chiefly - equally - incidentally

sa'e - SA-heh - precisely speaking - loosely speaking

sa'u - SA-hoo - simply - elaborating

ta'o - TA-ho - by the way - returning to main point

to'u - TO-hoo - in brief - in detail

va'i - VA-hee - in other words - in the same words

zu'u - ZOO-hoo - on the one hand - on the other hand

A little more info:

The BPFK (baupla fuzykamni, language-plan responsible-committee) is working on a Lojban dictionary. Here's various relevant sections:

Realis Attitudinals

Irrealis Attitudinals

Evidentials

Discursives

Attitudinal Specifiers

Intensifiers

The classic work on Lojban is The Complete Lojban Language by (mostly) John Cowan. Chapter 13 is about attitudinals.

And as far as I know, that's it! There have been a lot of discussions here & there about the meaning of the various words, but I don't know of any other formal writing that goes into attitudinals in particular. As Cniglic develops more, I hope that someday we can put together a dictionary of Cniglic, with lots of examples & illustrations & everything.

A Wee Language

  • mungojelly:
    Cniglic (SHNEE-gleesh) is a language which I found roaming wild in the hills of Lojbanistan. Lojban is known as a "Logical Language," but in fact beyond its logical abilities it is also a vast collection of many strange odds & ends, a grand attic of dusty antiques & strange contraptions. One interesting corner of Lojban is its attitudinals, words which are so useful for expressing yourself (especially in text) that they are always slipping into the dialect of English spoken in Lojbanistan. Lately I have been gently beginning to try to bring this subset of Lojban, and this trick of applying it to the English language, more fully into conscious & public awareness.
    Lojban itself requires a substantial commitment to be learned, nearly as much as a natural language, and while it is well worth it (IMHO), it can hardly be surprising that few people have taken that long hard trek into the unknown, just for the dubious intellectual pleasure of speaking to themselves & a few strangers in an utterly obscure (though intriguing) language. Cniglic is a place where you may dip your toe, and explore one of the most unique aspects of Lojban without having the buy the whole package. Not only does Cniglic have less than a hundred words, making it a smaller task to learn in whole than even Toki Pona, but because those words are used only to color & flavor English text, you can begin speaking with complete fluency from the first day, using whatever words you know.
    So, all you really need to know to begin speaking Cniglic is a single word. I'll teach you one right now: ".ui" The word ".ui" is pronounced "wee!" and it means that you are happy! (If you're happy and you know it, just say "wee!") That's the most basic way to use a word of Cniglic: Just say it by itself, to express how you are feeling. It's a bit like saying "ugh" or "wow." The other main way to use a Cniglic word is almost as simple: You can say it while you're talking about something, and it shows your feeling about the last thing you mentioned. For instance:
    I'm going for a walk .ui in the park!
    Which means that you are going for a walk in the park, and you're happy about walking. Similarly:
    I'm going for a walk in the park .ui!
    Which means that you are going for a walk in the park, and you're happy about the park. Incidentally, I use brackets to separate the Cniglic from the English-- other people use {curly braces} or (parentheses), or you can use nothing at all, it doesn't really matter.
    That's it; you know enough Cniglic to start speaking it with me, if you wish, and exploring this neat little toy which the inventors of Lojban have gifted us. As you explore more of it, you'll find that while it is quite simple structurally, it is actually quite productive: There are various modifiers which can be applied to each emotion, vastly multiplying how many different qualities can be expressed. It's kind of like smilies on steroids. :) .ui
    • krilltish:
      .ui!
      What does the full-stop do? Just a pause briefly in the sentence?
      Also, if -nai means negaing, opposite (equivalent to Esperanto mal-), would .uinainai still mean "happy" or just mean "the opposite of unhappy"?
      Last, can there be a table of the words that we have so far learned placed somewhere? If so, if it included normal spelling, an English spelling of the word, the meaning, and how to easily remember it, I would be much better off. If not, I will make one myself and figure out a way to put it here.
      Thanks! Ki'e!
      • mungojelly:
        The full-stop is a brief pause, yes. It can be said as a glottal stop. Lojban requires pauses at certain times, such as after saying someone's name. One of the times when a stop is required is before any word starting with a vowel, which explains why so many of them appear before the emotional sounds of Cniglic. .ui
        Until we come up with something specifically for Cniglic, the best reference for the sounds of the letters is Chapter Three of the Lojban Reference Grammar.
        >>Also, if -nai means negaing, opposite (equivalent to Esperanto mal-), would .uinainai still mean "happy" or just mean "the opposite of unhappy"?
        That's an interesting .a'u question! I'm going to pass it on to one of the Lojban mailing lists and get back to you. .ui.a'u
        Your suggestions for what to put in a list of words are excellent .i'o. I'm having trouble thinking of mnenomics for any of the words, though! Do you have any suggestions?
        I've totally just been improvising in how I'm teaching Cniglic. So I'm like: Yeah! Ok! Word lists! .ua! Good idea!  :> Another basic thing I could do is add a little glossary when I post with whatever words I've used, like:
        .a'u -- AH-hoo -- interested, curious
        .i'o -- EE-ho -- appreciation, gratitude
        .ua -- wah -- discovery
        .ui -- wee -- happy :)
        My strategy is that Cniglic is such a tiny language that it'll be easy to experiment with different ways of teaching it & see what happens. One idea I've been having is to use Cniglic words along English redundantly, like: "I hope .a'o you're having a nice day. Nice days make me happy .ui."
        • krilltish:
          I have some of the chart:

<tab class=wikitable head=top>Eŋg.; Pronun.; Remember; Meaning; .a'a Ah-hah attentiveness .a'e Ah-hay alertness .ai Ie intent .a'o ah-hoe Kind of sounds like I ho(pe) hope .au aw “Awww… It’s so cute!” desire .a'u Ah-hoo interest be'u Bay-hoo lack(ing) .e’i Ay-hee constraint (lack freedom) .e’o Ay-hoe request .e’u Ay-hoo suggesting/suggestion .e'a Ay-hah (granting) permission .e'e Ay-hay competence .ei Ay (extended) obligation .i’a ee-hah acceptance .i’e ee-hay approval .i’i ee-hee togetherness (anti-privacy) .i’u ee-hoo familiarity .ia yah belief .ie yay I said “’Yay’! Not ‘nay’!” agreement .ii yee “Ye be warned” fear (think of “Eeek!”) .io yoe respect .i'o ee-hoe appreciation (anti-envy) .iu yoo “I love you” love ju'o Ĵoo-hoe certainty .o’i Oe-hee caution .o'a Oe-hah pride .o'e Oe-hah closeness .oi oy “Oy, your stepping on my toe” complaint .o'o Oe-hoe patience .o'u Oe-hoo relaxation .u’a oo-hah gain .ua wah discovery, "Ah, I get it!" .ue way “No way!” surprise .u'e oo-hay wonder, "Wow!" .ui wee Sounds like Fr. “Oui” which you might say if you are happy happiness .u'i oo-hee amusement .uo woe Don’t be woeful- it’s over completion .uu woo pity, sympathy .u'u oo-hoo “Boo-hoo!” repentance, "I'm sorry!" </tab>

        • Unfortunately it doesn't translate exactly to this format. It uses a semi-colon as a column and I don't know how to change that. Sorry.
  • krilltish:
    The idea of using the Lojban words along with an English sentence already containing a word of equivalence, I think, could be good. The only thing that I would say about changing it is that the Lojban word should be at the end, to me that feels more natural. Otherwise it is like "I hope hope you are having a nice day". I would say "I hope you are having a nice day. I really hope" or something like it.
    I don't know how easily you might be able to understand what I am trying to say, I am remotely drowzy right now, but if you have any questions I will explain tomorrow (or later, .a'o).
    • mungojelly:
      I asked the lojban-beginners list about .uinainai and this is the consensus: It's not grammatical at the moment according to the official grammar, but if it were grammatical it would probably mean "the opposite of unhappy" (to the extent that's any different than "happy")!
      In Lojban "-nai" isn't a general purpose opposite-maker, it just has a few roles, like the one it plays in Cniglic, and also in forming logical connectives: "ganai X gi Y" is a very common thing to say and means "either not-X, or Y, or both not-X and Y, but definitely not both X and not-Y"-- IOW, "if X then Y"! (Lojban connectives are a brain-stretcher.) There's also a term "to'e" which means "the scalar opposite of," and an affix form, "tol-", so you can put it on the word "melbi" (beautiful) to make "tolmelbi" (ugly). That performs a lot of the role of E-O's "mal-". But I'm getting off-topic, now. :)
      • mungojelly:
        Excellent .uisai.i'o! Here's another one for ".uo": "Whoa, nelly! It's time to stop; we've finished getting here!" Where should we put this kind of stuff? I considered putting this on the profile page as well, but I feel like I'd rather keep that concise and start working somewhere on a much larger dictionary. Examples, mnenomics, long explanations, etc. Maybe a wiki would be good? Do you happen to know .a'o any particularly good wiki farm?
        • krilltish:
          Yeah, that looks about right.
          Okay, that makes sense and thanks.
  • mungojelly:
    glossary:
coi (name) do'u -- hello
.ui nai -- sadness
.i'u nai ro'e -- mentally unfamiliar
ga'i cu'i -- equal rank
.ue ru'e -- weakly surprised
.ui .oi nai fu'i -- happiness, easy pleasure
coi krilltish do'u! I tried really hard to like Wikia, since it's what you found. It's got big graphical ads, though, and I literally couldn't even figure out how to put some text on the main page amidst all their junk .ui nai. I made a Cniglic wikispaces: http://cniglic.wikispaces.com/ -- what do you think of that? I don't know Wikia and Wikispaces in depth to know how they compare on features .i'u nai ro'e, but Wikispaces seems a lot simpler & cleaner to me. I'm not trying to be in charge here & so I wanted to ask you ga'i cu'i if Wikispaces works for you & what you think, before putting any effort into it-- I just made a couple of stubs to demonstrate & test it out (it allows .ue ru'e crazy names of pages like ".a'i", so that's good).
Once we have a wiki that's working for us, I'm going to use it as a scrapbook for usage examples and I'm going to use the discussion pages for my own musings on the words. I thought of uploading like a smiley face icon for ".ui"-- I'm not sure of the pedagogical value of that, but I felt like it'd make it feel like home if we hung up some pictures. .ui .oi nai fu'i
  • krilltish:
    One thing I don't like with the wikispace is that it is hard to tag articles (such as assigning them to categories). I don't know if that is because of the fact that I haven't worked with it long enough (and I don't know if I correctly understand on how to set up categories on other wikis as well) or if it is just incompatable with the feature. It would be useful to hae categories at the bottom of the page so that if one looks up .ui it will say at the bottm that the article is an attitudinal indicator. Then one can click on the category "attitudinal indicator" and see every article that is about one.
  • krilltish:
    Is there a place to go (online) like this one but where one may get help on anything pertaining to Lojban (and even better, maybe other languages .a'o)? For instance, I am having a lot of trouble with be bei and be'o, but I don't want to clog up the comments here with things not pertaining to Cniglic. (Is it not interesting how, when typing in English I majasculize the names, but if I was inserting a "Lojban word" I would use "lowercase letters"?) Thanks, like usual.

The Seven Point Scale

mungojelly:

  • The heart of Cniglic is 39 basic emotional indicators, such as .ui (happiness), .a'o (hope), .o'a (pride), and .u'u (repentance). Each of these can be negated with nai, to make the opposite, for instance .uinai (sadness), .a'onai (despair), .o'anai (shame) and .u'unai (lack of regret). So each one actually represents a scale, for instance .ui represents a scale from being very happy to being very sad.
The midpoint of the scale is expressed by cu'i. Often the middle of the scale is just a neutral emotion, for instance .uicu'i means that you're neither happy nor sad. Sometimes the midpoint of the scale has a more definite sense to it, for instance .o'acu'i (the midpoint between pride & shame) expresses humility, modesty, oh it was nothing. The midpoint between repentance and lack of regret, .u'ucu'i, means that you are innocent altogether. In the list of definitions (see the top of this page), if there are three meanings given, they are the positive meaning, the neutral meaning (with cu'i), and the opposite meaning (with nai).
There are also three indicators of intensity: ru'e means a weak or slight feeling, sai a strong or significant feeling, and cai a very strong or intense feeling. Together with nai and cu'i, this gives each emotion a seven point scale:
cai, sai, ru'e, cu'i, nairu'e, naisai, naicai
For instance:
.uicai - extremely happy
.uisai - happy
.uiru'e - a bit happy
.uicu'i - neither happy nor sad
.uinairu'e - a bit sad
.uinaisai - sad
.uinaicai - extremely sad
So that brings us to 39 * 7 = 273 different expressions already, and that's before even getting into the various other modifiers. :)
I'd like to say welcome to the three people who have joined this community already .uicai. Please feel free to introduce yourselves if you want, or to post anything else you'd like. I assure you that all you need to know of Cniglic to start speaking it is a single word; that's been part of my objective in imagining this language .o'aru'e is to lower the barrier to entry all the way to the floor .ui. I also would be glad to answer any questions as best I can, and I'd appreciate .uisai any suggestions anyone has about how to teach Cniglic, so that it can soon spread to many people .a'osai.

Opinion

slobin:

  • I believe that lojban/natlang mix is limited neither to cmavo (syntax) nor to emotions (semantic). For example, rafsi mal- and zan- may be very useful as prefixes to English (or Russian, or whichever else) words. "This is zanlogical, and that is malemotional". (But the second usage has a problem: many Lojban speakers know also Esperanto, and Esperanto prefix mal- has a different meaning). On the other hand, some lojbanic tense modifiers are useful in natlang text: "do it rauroi!".
... ganai da'i mi cespre gi mi cusku lu ko zifre li'u do ...
  • spheniscine:
    Then again, the Latin prefix mal- does have more or less the same meaning as it does in Lojban.
  • mungojelly:
    Well one way to make mal- and zan- clearer of course would be to use mably- and zabny-!
I'm very interested in the idea of making more Lojban/English hybrids, but I'd like to make it somewhat a separate topic from Cniglic. Cniglic is intended to be an exceptionally easy dialect, for absolute beginners. I believe that it's important not only to make the first step ridiculously easy-- in the case of Cniglic it's as easy as saying .ui after something-- but also to put fluency/mastery of the language within sight from the beginning.
In time, for instance, I imagine there being fluent Cniglic speakers who don't speak Lojban (or who speak only very basic Lojban). They would still be empowered within the Cniglic community to teach others & to add to the literature & culture of Cniglic-- they'd be fully qualified advanced speakers of Cniglic, not just partially qualified beginning Lojbanists. At one word learned per day, someone can become a fluent speaker of Cniglic in about three months-- that's not an unreasonable commitment, but it is a substantial one, and I believe it's best to offer people a sense of security and mastery after that much work.
I am not not not discouraging the idea of making deeper hybrids, in fact I'm just as interested in that, but I would prefer to move it to another space. We should work together .au.e'u both on imagining different styles of hybrid, and on arranging the cultural linkages & barriers which will make those hybrids useful both each on their own & together as a system for teaching Lojban.
For instance, another hybrid I've been imagining would apply the BAI cmavo to English in the same way that Cniglic applies the UI cmavo. This could be either envisioned as a second step after Cniglic-- so once you learned Cniglic, you'd move on to BAI-glic, whatever it's called-- or it could also be envisioned as a parallel entryway, so you can learn either Cniglic or BAI-glic separately, and then later connect the parts together.
Another possibility rattling in my mind for a simplified Lojban would involve selecting a subset of the gismu as a beginner's dialect. At the moment there's no clear sense of which gismu are easier or for beginners, and there are a LOT of gismu, so it's a long time before you can have any confidence in reading Lojban texts. I've been studying Lojban for years and I still have to look up a gismu or at least a rafsi in nearly every text I encounter-- in what you wrote here I needed to look up "ces", for instance.
(BTW, for non-Lojbanists, what slobin said in Lojban was: Suppose I was a holy person, then I'd say to you, "Be free!")
I'm interested to hear how you think it would be most effective to hybridize Lojban with English. I like your idea of applying rafsi as if they were affixes-- do you think that would work as a strictly defined hybrid? What gismu other than mabla and zabna would you include? It seems to me like we could choose a reasonably-sized set and create a dialect of English/Lojban that's as productive as Esperanto. :)
  • spheniscine:
    I do wonder why, though, that despite Esperanto's relative success, that there hasn't been much borrowing from it into English?
  • mungojelly:
    I think the word "relative" is key. Esperanto is by far the most successful conlang .ui.i'i, but it's still far behind .uinairu'e the most widely spoken natlangs. It's probably about on the level of Zulu, Kazakh, or Bulgarian, and you don't see English borrowings from them, either. :)
  • spheniscine:
    .ie That makes sense.
  • slobin:
    Consider Rakia or Kumis to name first (sorry, no Zulu example ;-). I believe that main reason is different: there is no Esperanto culture different from average human or average European one. There is just nothing to borrow. In fact as far as something worth borrowing appears, the borrowing occurs. I have heard from people (not speaking E-o, but someway related to E-o congresses) the word "esperantaĵ" (-o omitted) as a term for the E-o-related souvenir.

P.S. Just to avoid possible confusion: I am not English or American, I am Russian. English is not my native language.

... mi na natfe sepi'o le xance ...
  • krilltish:
    You speak/type English very well.
What does sepi'o mean?
Sorry that this is slightly zo'o late.
  • krilltish:
    Now that I understand the meaning of the conversation, I would find that to be really interesting. It would also allow a fairly good perspective on how to utilize the correct rafsi in order to create a lujvo with the meaning that one actually desires. Actually, I would like to better learn how to make lujvo myself (I do not understand how the slots develop to well).
It would be interesting to see a compiled list of affixes/rafsi that could be useful in English.
  • slobin:
    >> What does sepi'o mean?
    "Using tool". The whole sentence is an attempt to translate "I don't deny things with my HANDS" from Carroll's "Alice".
    ... lo mlatu cu nelci lo nu se nelci ...
  • krilltish:
    Oh, I see. Thank you.

I hope you'll be interested in ".a'o" and ".a'u" :)

mungojelly:

  • So I posted an introduction various places, saying that you only needed to know one word to begin speaking Cniglic, and teaching you the word .ui .ui! Sure enough, several of you responded by writing comments in which you said .ui. speccygeekgrrl even gave us a plug, thank you. :)
I haven't noticed anyone saying .uinai yet, but hopefully that's because you're all feeling well. :)
I figure slow & steady wins the race, so here we are a few days later and I thought I'd share with you just a couple more scales that you might find useful. Many of you expressed that you were "interested" in Cniglic, so I thought you might like .a'u, which expresses being interested. Something you say .a'u about is something which interests you, something which you are curious about, something that concerns you. If you say .a'unai on the other hand you're describing something you feel repulsed by, something you want to not know about & to stay away from, maybe even that disgusts you. In the middle is .a'ucu'i, which says that while you don't have any particular curiosity or interest in something, you're not actively avoiding it either.
I've been thinking about Cniglic .a'u for a while now, and I've started sharing it with you among other reasons so that I can see what it's like .a'usai once it's spoken by a community of people.
Another Cniglic word which is one of my favorites .ui is .a'o, which means hope. Something you mark with .a'o is something which you hope will take place, something which you wish or long for. (.a'onai marks something you dread, something you hope won't happen.) Besides being one of my favorites, it's also useful for illustrating a property of some of the words of Cniglic which might not be obvious at first glance. Saying .a'o can change the proposition expressed by a sentence, in the same way that saying "I hope" can change a sentence from being about a real event to being about a theoretical event, one you only hope is going to happen.
For instance, if you said, "I'm going .a'o to the store," there's an implication that it's not so certain whether you're going or not, just like "I hope I'm going to the store" expresses less certainty than just "I'm going to the store." To give an even stronger example, "she's back from the store by now .a'o" implies that you don't yet know whether she's back or not, only that you hope she is, similar to "she's back from the store by now, I hope."
So that's enough for this lesson. You each have a growing understanding .a'o of Cniglic. With the three scales .ui, .a'o and .a'u, plus the five words nai (opposite), cu'i (in the middle), ru'e (weak), sai (strong) and cai (extreme) which together paint the seven point scale, we've gone over a first 8 words, which is more than a twelfth of the language already! You have a sense .a'o of the amount of effort required to become fluent, which isn't .a'o an overwhelming .a'onairu'e amount.
I've tried to offer you a language which you feel .a'osai like you personally can quickly take a meaningful place in .a'u, that you can understand well enough to make it your own .a'o.a'u.ui. I want to know what visions .a'usai you each already have for Cniglic. Where can we take this new language .ui.a'u, together? :)
  • krilltish:
    >> "she's back from the store by now .a'o."
I think that it should be noted that this does not imply a sense of dread (maybe you heard that there was a shooting at the store a few hours ago). It is simply a feeling of hope. To say the dread it would be "she's back from the store by now .a'o .o'unai/.uinai" or maybe even the use of a.onai (though the latter I believe to have a different meaning, akin to "I hope that she isn't back from the store by now"/"She's back from the store by now!").

I've Heard That Evidentials Are Awesome

mungojelly:

  • My plan for teaching the words of Cniglic is that it's such a small collection that I can start out teaching them once through, and it won't be long before I've gone over them all and can go back and hit them each a second time. Especially if there are other Lojbanists helping .a'o me, but even if I have to do most of the work myself,
    I'll be able to quickly put out a rough draft version and then add more details & teaching methods over time. Here's a first go at explaining the evidential system, which makes up 11 of Cniglic's 93 words.
    There are actually three different related systems which make up Cniglic. I went back and forth about how much to include before settling on the selection that I've presented to you (& BTW it's still perfectly open to being altered, expanded or contracted, if it turns out that a different subset would be more useful to us). In the end I decided to include all three of these systems from Lojban, which are really related mostly by their grammar, because I felt like the resulting language was still a managable size to learn. The three systems which make up Cniglic are first, of course, the attitudinals, second the evidentials, and thirdly the discursives. The attitudinals show the speaker's relationship to the concept being expressed-- whether it's something they love or hate, enjoy or dislike, deeply believe or just wish for. The evidentials show how the speaker came to have knowledge of what they're saying: whether
they discovered it themselves, heard it from a friend, experienced it directly or inherited it from their culture. The discursives show relationships between the things that are being said, themselves, and manage the flow of discourse-- they're about the process of the conversation.
  • I've posted a little so far about attitudinal scales (such as .ui, happiness, and .a'o, hope), so today I thought I'd write an introduction to the evidentials. Often when we're talking we're describing what the world is like. We believe various things about the world for various reasons, such as seeing them ourselves or hearing about them from other people. Using evidentials allows us to easily be explicit about how we came to know what we are saying.
    ca'e is one of the funnest words I know of. An expression marked with ca'e is true because it's said; it's self-proving. The standard example is when a minister says "I now pronounce you husband & wife." Here's another example: Ordering at a restaurant: "I'll have the salmon ca'e" -- it's true that it's your order, because you're saying it.
    ti'e marks something you've heard from someone else. You don't have to literally hear it with your ears-- something you read in the newspaper is ti'e territory, unless you also experienced it personally.
    ka'u marks something that you know from your culture. Like how do you know that Monday comes after Sunday? It's not exactly that you heard it from someone else, like hearsay. ka'u is for the sort of things that you have been raised by your culture to know.
    se'o is for experiences which are entirely personal to you, such as dreams and thoughts.
    za'a is used when retelling something you personally observed. This marks the ordinary sort of knowledge from perceiving an event or object in the world: "I saw a red fire hydrant za'a."
    ba'a runs on a scale from the future to the past. ba'a marks an event that you anticipate experiencing in the future, ba'acu'i marks something that you're experiencing right now, and ba'anai marks something that you remember experiencing in the past.
    ja'o means that you have come to the conclusion that something is true, based on reasoning from some other information. ja'o is similar to English's "thus" or "therefore."
    su'a marks a generalization, a conclusion drawn about a category of things based on abstracting from a number of examples. The opposite, su'anai, is to conclude about a particular case based on generalities, "it was a fire truck so it must have been red su'anai."
    pe'i marks something which is your opinion. "Vanilla ice cream is delicious pe'i."
    ru'a marks a postulate, something you presume to be true. "Dr. Livingstone ru'a"
    ju'a, finally, is the default elliptical/vague basis, similar to ge'e among the attitudinals. An unmarked sentence is by default only ju'a, stated with some unspecified evidence. ju'a can be used in question form, ju'apei or peiju'a, to mean "what is your evidence? how do you know? what evidential describes your knowledge of that?"
    So that's a first glimpse into Cniglic's evidential system, borrowed of course from Lojban, which borrowed it from Laadan, which borrowed it from Native American languages. There are probably some other influences in there too. It's a fair amount of history, for eleven little words. That's part of why I thought it was worthwhile to include them in Cniglic.
  • krilltish:
    WOAH!!! These could be so useful! I could probably utilize them even more then the attitudinals! Thanks a ton!
  • mungojelly:
    I'm glad se'o that you enjoy za'a them.
I've been thinking that maybe the evidentials do deserve pe'i to be a separate language in addition to being part of Cniglic. Here's one idea for how it could work:
The very first minilojban you learn could be named Coi, and it's just the COI cmavo, which is 16 words. They're like "hi", and "please" and "thank you", so it seems to me like a sensible way to welcome newcomers. It even has a word for "welcome".
The second minilojban could be to add the evidentials. They're a little less intuitive than the COI and a little more interesting. It'd be a first real taste of something Lojbanic, but packaged as one tiny self-contained system.
Next perhaps you could add the discursives, before going to Cniglic. So the progression would look like this:
  • COI (16 words total)
  • COI + evidentials (27 words total)
  • COI + evidentials + discursives (43 words total)
  • COI + evidentials + discursives + attitudinals = Cniglic (109 words total, including the COI)
  • krilltish:
    That's a good idea. We could put a gigantic sign at the beginning of this page (the main Cniglic page) saying "If you want to learn [this], go [here]. If you want to learn [this thing], then go [to this place]." That would not only break it down into smaller packages, but would also give someone a specific place to go to if they want to learn particlar thing, instead of having to go searching for that particular piece of information everywhere here. .a'u cai
  • krilltish:
    IS there any way to include all the articles of Lojban into Cniglic? They aren't exactly as "emotional" or universal as the other things, but they could still be useful. Just a thought. .e'osai-ru'e.a'o
  • mungojelly:
    Cniglic seemed at first to me to be a very small slice, since I was selecting it out of the thousands of words of Lojban. Now that I've had more time working with it, I can see how it should really be sliced down even further. We might not be able to sustain continual attention & activity about an evidentialese and a discursivese and so forth, but we could focus what attention is paid to those things together in a form (like a wiki) that will maintain it as a useful resource.
This is my thinking right now as to how to slice it:
COI cmavo -- evidentials -- discursives -- the basic set of attitudinals, with the 39 scales and 7 points -- an advanced set of attitudinals, with the other modifiers and grammar
It's not just a matter of how to slice it, though, it's also a question of how the pieces are arranged and how they're used. For instance, as I've been imagining it at the moment, Cniglic contains Evidentialese as a subpart, or to put it another way, in order to be a fluent speaker of Cniglic you also have to be a speaker of Evidentialese. It could just as well be the other way around, where you learn Cniglic on its own and then you need to be a speaker of Cniglic to learn Evidentialese. My main motivation for thinking of it ordered this way is that Evidentialese is much smaller, and I've been putting a priority on making the early steps seem tiny.
The main reason I'd like to slice Cniglic down further is to make it even easier to attain a sense of mastery. I think we should arrange it so people can start learning COI cmavo, and within a week or two they're already A. moving on to a more advanced topic, while B. feeling a sense of mastery over the COI, and confidently saying "coifi'ido'u" (hello and welcome, someone!) to the people who join just after them.
  • mungojelly:
    We should also think about what should be the next step after Cniglic, and I think articles are one good candidate for that. One of the main things that unifies the elements of Cniglic is their grammar within Lojban, as UI cmavo. The grammar of COI is different (but very simple), so we'll have to teach two levels of grammar in order to teach the COI as well. Those are perhaps the simplest bits of Lojbanic grammar: COI cmavo are followed by a name (and terminated by "do'u"), and UI cmavo go directly after something that they modify.
    My idea for a few steps further along the line is to have a transition from jboglibau (Lojbanic English) to glijbobau (Englishy Lojban). In the jboglibau, Lojban appears occasionally, perhaps quoted by {}-brackets or bold text. In the easiest glijbobau, English would still hold most of the meaning, but it would be properly quoted and embedded by Lojban's rules, for instance: mi stidi .ui la'e zoi zoi. let's go to the park .zoi do - I'm happy to suggest to you, let's go to the park. You could learn a few gismu & how to embed English into them, and be on the Lojban side of the fence while still not knowing how to say much in Lojban. :)
    But so far I like the idea of progressing from simple to complex grammar, and the bridi grammar is the most complex. Introducing articles early would go together with teaching the tanru grammar early, which I've been thinking about. Tanru grammar is fun & way less complex than bridi grammar, though I haven't really thought that much yet about how it can be taught in isolation. It makes sense to me, though, to learn lo xunre (a red thing), lo klama (a goer), lo se klama (a destination), lo xunre se klama (a red destination), and then once you've got some sumti under your belt to start thinking about filling more than one klama role simultaneously.
    What exactly do you have in mind when you say "articles"? Just selma'o LE and LA? When do you think it would make sense to teach those, and how would they relate to everything else?
  • krilltish:
    I really like those ideas about the different steps. I am not exactly certain about what tanru is/are but from what I've seen above, I think it would be useful, important, and fun. By articles, I was thinking starting off with a simple "la, le, li, lo (and not lu)" and progressing from that to "-'e" and "-i" "-'i". We should probably also discuss lu'a and lu'o. I don't know the order those last few should be in, but I do think that they should be included somewhere. The best place to put them in probably would be in glijbobau (or possibly late jboglibau). I don't know whether making it an entire "subset language" would work or not.
    I don't know if I have established the following yet, but I feel that before this gets to far, that I should tell you. I am not very good with Lojban at all. I only have the vaguest understanding of a few beginners' courses and suck at remembering the words. I am using cniglic as a supplementary tool and therefore my entire success with Lojban basically hinges on the success pe cnigic. I figure that that is kind of the point of cniglic, but I don't want you guys expecting too much out of me when I can't deliver it. I will be more than happy to help here and am trying very hard to improve the little Lojban that I do have under my belt. So there it is .u'u .a'ocai .ii .ausai.
    I have just remembered an idea I had while thinking about how hard a time I have for remembering the vocabulary. I don't know if it will work but I thought I might as well present it and take/give it a shot. I called it "Latnijbobau" because I haven't had access to the Internet lately and in this period of Internetless time I came up with it; the name is intended to mean Romantic Lojban (or Latinlike Lojban) but I didn't know how to say "Latin" in Lojban at the time and I still haven't. Regardless, I have grown fond of the name and will probably call it that for ever even if it gets an official renaming. Basically, it doesn't mess with the grammar of Lojban but it does make the vocabulary easier for me to learn. For more information on it, you can(?) go to " http://cniglic.wikia.com/wiki/Latnijbobau ". Currently the page is a stub and uninforming bt tomorrow I plan on expanding.
    Well, I have been talking to long and my family is calling for me so co'o!
  • mungojelly:
    Everyone has trouble remembering the words of Lojban. They're very strange and there's an astonishing number of them. Lojban is a very inclusive language, with open-ended power sticking out in every direction. It says right in its Wikipedia article: "Does not have simplicity as a design criterion."
Everyone in Lojbanistan understands that only a subset of the possibilities latent in Lojban can actually be explored by a community while still understanding each other. (More than other communities, Lojban occasionally tilts towards exploring more of its own terrain, and understanding each other less! This is not just a negative, mind you: We are a very exploratory linguistic community.) There is a lot of dialogue and politics behind the scenes over the decades sai about what parts of Lojban (as a defined, abstract set of possibilities) will become Lojban (as a realized, spoken & written human language).
Some parts of Lojban are emphasized more than others in practice. In fact, Lojban has a whole class of words which are copied directly from other languages, the fu'ivla (fukpi zei valsi, copy-words). For instance two words of Lojban with fine pedigree are oxtapodi (= octopus) and djirafa (= giraffe). I'm not very expert yet in making fu'ivla. I researched it a little bit earlier, and the main thing I learned is that there are far more fu'ivla theoretically available than I had realized. I'm sure it would be possible to create a dialect of Lojban which sounds much more Latinate within the rules of Lojban as they stand, just by putting far more emphasis on exploring fu'ivla space.
.ia There is enough room in the space defined by Lojban for many different languages. .au This space should by explored by different dialects as Lojban expands into its next era. Cniglic is not exactly a dialect of Lojban, but Cniban is. Cniban is what I call the emotional indicators used entirely on their own, like: ".ai .au .e'e .e'a .u'ucu'i .a'u .ei .oiru'e .oinaisairo'a .ua .ueru'ero'e ge'e ge'e .u'i .ai .a'a .a'e" I just said that, and it's perfectly valid to say in Lojban; it's just that no one speaks Lojban that way. It's been spoken that way occasionally-- there's a poem written in that style-- but it's never been deeply explored.
You can help Cniglic a whole lot just by being brave enough .o'inaidai to speak it. It won't hurt Cniglic or Lojban if we just start using the attitudinals as much as we can .e'e.e'a. Some of the uses we come up with might later be found to be malglico (too much like English) or otherwise unwise, but it'll be easy enough to adjust our usage as we dialogue with the wider Lojban community and develop an ever clearer idea of what Cniglic is and how it works. Cniglic is much more in danger of dying from lack of energy than from imprecision or getting ahead of itself, so we should use it .ai.ai any way that occurs to us as much as we feel like it, and ba'a it will be easy enough to redirect that energy in the future to make the language of Cniglic more useful for itself and in relation to its parent Lojban .io.
  • krilltish:
    Well said and thank you.
I actually had in mind something slightly different than the fu'ivla language, but that could be very interesting as well. I especially like the word oxtapodi, which literally would mean "eight legs" (instead of the English "eight leg").

"pei", Cniglic's Question Word

mungojelly:

  • I have a question for y'all:
Cniglic pei?
Used on its own like that, Cniglic's question word, pei, means: "How do you feel about that?" You could respond with any attitudinal, for instance: .a'u, I'm interested, .a'aru'e, I'm paying a little bit of attention, .oinairo'e, I feel an intellectual pleasure, or just ge'e, I feel something.
Another way to use pei is to use it as a modifier on a basic attitude, in which case the question is: "How do you feel about this thing on that scale?" For instance, I could ask:
Cniglic .o'upei?
Meaning: "How relaxed (.o'u) or stressed (.o'unai) are you about Cniglic?" You could answer by giving a point on the seven point scale, for instance: ru'e, a little relaxed, cu'i, neither stressed nor
relaxed, or naisai, very stressed.
The third way to use pei is to put it before an attitudinal :scale. In this usage it's more of a yes/no question meaning: "Is this the way you feel?" For instance:
Cniglic pei.ui?
"Do you feel happy about Cniglic?"
  • krilltish:
    Figured that I might as well answer (I thought I did, but apparently that is untrue): pei.uicai(cai*)
  • Another question: Is the idea behind, for example(s), .uicaicai or .iusaicai grammatically correct? I would think so, it would just show an extreme amount of extreme happiness or, another way, when concerning happiness, it would measure with a great/extreme magnitude in the extreme amount category.
  • Yet another question: It might be slightly redundant, but is there a word like Japanese "wa" that marks the topic of the sentence, in Lojban?
  • mungojelly:
    It makes sense to me to have a whole scale from ru'eru'e to caicai. I've never seen the issue discussed; we could perhaps take the idea to the lojban list and see what people think. In Lojban the way the intensities are usually used goes like this: Almost everything is unmarked. Occasionally, something will be marked sai to show an extra degree of intensity. More occasionally, "ru'e" is used to show that an attitude is weaker than might be expected. The most rare is "cai", which seems to be reserved for very intense emotional situations.
There's a topic-comment system in Lojban using the word "zo'u", that looks like this: "((topic)) zo'u ((comment))"
  • krilltish:
    That makes sense ki'e. I think it would be interesting to see what others think on the Lojban list, but it probably would turn out just like yours. I might post it, but I first have to get more acquainted to the system.

Mad Props

mungojelly:

  • In a recent message on a Lojban list, komfo,amonan (who's an important pe'i lojbanist) posted this paragraph:

Even though for technical reasons I won't personally be able to check this out in the near future, I want to thank you for pushing the important TTS work forward. .io sai (Mad props!) .i mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan.

I think the translation of .io sai as "mad props" is very apt, so I thought I'd share it with y'all.
Part of my goal with Cniglic is to funnel some of the teaching that does go on day to day in Lojbanistan into a more accessible form. I'm going to be bringing you examples from time to time of Cniglic as encountered in the wild zo'o, and I've also started to gently but persistently ask questions about the attitudinals on the beginners' list, so I'll probably be posting highlights of those exchanges.
Also, a personal milestone: I now know all of the attitudinal scales! Meaning I know all of them at least to the point of recalling their keywords, which is hardly fluency, so this is still the one-eyed leading the blind. :) I know all of the keywords, and I remember what all 39 of the scales are, so I can go over them all in my mind; I think it's a good meditation, if you're thinking about how you feel about something. I believe that I know all of Cniglic now except for a few of the discursives.
Now when I'm going over the scales in my mind, I can remember komfo,amonan's gloss of .io sai, along with all the keywords & my memories of encountering attitudinals in Lojban literature, etc, and continue clarifying my understanding. .ua.ui.uobu'o.uonaibu'o (discovery, happiness, beginning to be finished & beginning to be unfinished)
  • krilltish:
    >> "examples from time to time of Cniglic as encountered in the wild zo'o."
zo'o I was rereading this and read it as "in the wild (zoo)". Which was quite funny to me.

.u'a high five!

  • mungojelly:
    • Here's a field excerpt from the Lojban IRC channel on .u'a, which means "gain" (marking something from which you gained, something which was good for you):
    • dbrock: .u'a?
    • dbrock: or .ui .u'a
    • kris_: hm, yeah. it sounds like something you might say before a high-five
    • 'kris_: .u'a slap
    • dbrock: haha, yeah!
  • mungojelly:
    • Here's another one:
    • cmacis: and the clocks go forward tonight .oi le'o
    • Twey: .uu
    • cmacis says .oi le'o, which means I feel pain in an aggressive way, or GRRRRRRHH!, so then Twey says .uu, which expresses sympathy.

ta'a coi

krilltish:

  •  coi, "Hello!"  I was thinking, and have discussed with MungoJelly, that introducing the subset language of Coi could/will be beneficial to beginners.  Coi is just as easy to learn as the attitudinals of strict Cniglic.  Coi is just a language centred around the use of vocatives (words that indicate who the person being addressed is, the speaker, or to indicate to that person that he or she ought to be listening).  None of it is really complex, but I think we should start off with just a few so here they are:
    coi - "Hello", "greetings", etc.  It is used at anytime of the day and may be said/written to anyone.  Iff followed by a name (such as "coi Samantha"), it means that you are greeting that person ("Hello Samantha!")
    mi'e - "My name is...", "I am (called)...", etc.  It is used to introduce oneself.  This is the only vocative to be followed by the speaker's name.
    do'u - terminates the previous vocative.  Used when that vocative would otherwise not be alone (such as coi do'u, "Hello!") , but is intended to do so.  This is an important term because without it, the following word(s) would be part of that vocative.  For example: coi Samantha! = Hello(,) Samantha! -- while: coi do'u Samantha! = Hello!  Samantha...
    • where the ellipses means "is doing something"
    So right now, I can say coi  do'u mi'e .kryltyc., or "Hello!  I am Krilltish".
    ta'a - "Excuse me".  Used when one is interrupting in a conversation.
    Another useful word is fe'o.  This word ends communication, like "Over and out!" when using a radio.  It should be used at the end of an e-mail iff one does not intend to continue the conversation.  Otherwise, use mu'o ("Over!") or co'o, which means "good-bye" or "see you later".  The latter, would probably be used more in normal, verbal conversation and shows a break in interaction (like fe'o and mu'o), but means that the conversation is meant to be resumed (unlike fe'o), and as soon as possible (unlike mu'o).  muo  is basically saying that you are done talking right now (of course, it does not only imply verbal communication, that is just an idiom of English).
    So, don't be afraid to drop by, say "coi", and tell me what you think!
    mi'e .kryltyc. fe'o 

Doi!

krilltish:

  •  Sorry, I forgot about a very important vocative.  This vocative is doi, which does not mean "Duh!"or "Wow.  I am so dumb for forgetting something so important!", as I used it above.
doi really indicates who or what the user is addressing.  In the previous lesson, one could address someone by using a vocative, inserting a pause (which was represented by a full stop mark (a period), though while in a partially English text the pause was left out), and then saying the addressee's name.  However, with doi, the pause may be left out.  So: coi .djon. (hello John) <--> coi doi djon.
Also, if I said just doi djon., it would mean something like "Hey, John!"  So "Houston, we have a problem" could be expressed "doi Houston, we have a problem". 
It may not seem like it, but doi could be used quite frequently
fe'o

fi'i to Coi

krilltish:

  • Well, it has been a few days now since I last posted, and I thought that I should introduce a few more vocatives to you Coi vocabulary:
    fi'i-    Welcome/Bienvenue (French)/How may I help you/Make yourself at home/At your service!   Indicates an offer of hospitality or a service.  To be said to a visitor or guest.
    re'i-   Ready!  Indicates that one is prepared to receive a message.  If you answer a telephone, use this (not coi)- it operates like Italian "Pronto!" (Ready!) in this case.
    je'e-  Roger!/Right/Uh-uh.  It acknowledges (confirms) that you've received a message. 
    je'enai-   Beg your pardon?/Huh?  Basically the opposite of je'e.
    ke'o-   Could you please repeat that?
    pe'u-   Introduces a request
    vi'o-    Wilco!/Okay/All right, I will/Consider it done!  Acknowledges a request, and promises to carry it out.
    ju'i-  Attention!/Hey!
    ju'icu'i-      At ease!
    ju'inai-      Don't pay attention/Ignore me
    mu'onai-   more to follow
    ki'e-  Thank you.  Indicates gratitude to which the appropriate response is not fi'i.  Use je'e to acknowledge the gratitude.
    So there they are.  .a'o Next lesson I plan to cover the remaining basic Coi vocabulary and to introduce the fairly intuitive matter of opposites and neutrals (I included some in this lesson because I thought that they might aid comprehension of a certain word and/or would be useful).  fe'o

  • krilltish:
    By the way, in case if you have not figured it yet out, many of these vocatives actually operate as a particular meaning of "okay", and they are much more precise.

Vocatives

krilltish:

  • The last few, basic vocatives are:
nu'e - introduces a promise.
                                 I promise, Mei Li. = nu'e Mei Li
pe'u - introduces a request (yeah, I know I that I put this one in the just previous lesson)
                                 Please, Chester. = pe'u Chester
be'e - reuest to send/"Hello, are you there?"
                                 May I speak, Jason? = be'e Jason?
Some more complicated words  will follow, but they are not too hard to understand:
nu'ecu'i - releases a promise
nu'enai - non-promise
ki'enai - disappreciation/ingratitude
fi'inai - unwelcome/inhospitality
fi'icu'i - does not care whether your presence is there or not, uncaring (on the scale of welcome)
re'inai -not ready yet
                                 Use it when someone is about to give you there telephone number but you do not have your pencil and/or paper yet
vi'onai - will not comply
ke'onai - no need to repeat
fe'onai - not done
mi'enai - non-identification
je'e - you are welcome/no problem/it was nothing (after someone thanks you)
  • krilltish:
    "fe'o nai" does not mean "I did not do...", but rather "I am not yet done talking" or "You cannot shut me up (that easily)" depending on the situation zo'o.

Erasure ([si], [sa], [su]). And [zo]

krilltish:

  • I do not want to take over the idea of this language being centred around attitudinals, evidentials, and discursives.  Actually, scanning http://www.jbotcan.org/, I saw that learning to use attitudinals correctly is absolutely essential. However, this language is intended, I believe, to introduce people to basic and universal Lojbanic ideas (and in the process, words).
    I think that a really original and cool/neat/sweet/awesome/wicked (whatever the terrm is now) class of words found in Lojban are si, sa, and su. These words do something which is called "erasure".  As you might expect, they correct (erase and "write over") past words.  They work really well in Lojban, but (because English has a different system) I am not sure how well they will merge with English.  This might turn out to be a disaster, but I thought that we should give it a shot.  I am especially worried about sa, for reasons that should become obvious to you later.
    si = erases one word back.  String multiple sis together to get further and further back (I put each si apart from the others (si si si), unless if the list of them is extremely long (si si si si si si si si si si).  Then I could si zo'o grouping them together in groups of two or three (sisi sisi sisi sisi sisi or sisisi sisisi sisisi si). 
    It is kind of like "wait..I meant...", "..or..", "errr...that was", "that is to say", etc.  The (non-erasure) word that follows it replaces both the word immediately previous to si and the word "si" itself.
    • There is a usage (most prominently on the IRC) to, if you mess up spelling something, put the misspelled word as the next entry followed by si and the correct spelling:
    I went over to my frend's house.
    frend's si friend's.
    • This is not the grammatically most correct usage, but there you have it.
    sa = erases back to the most recent occurrence of text of the same word type as the following word(s).  If I say "He sees me sa gives me the camera", it erases back to the last verb (because "gives" is a verb).  You have to then replace the text following the verb as well, because everything up to and including the verb is erased as well.  It is like "He sees me... no, no he doesn't, sorry... He gives me the camera".
    As stated previously, I am most worried about this one.  In Lojban, there is only one possible identification of what the "verb" is in the sentence, for example.  Therefore, sa cannot be misinterpreted for erasing the latest "verb".  However, in English this is not the case.  I am worried that there is some ambiguity in what word is erased in an English sentence such as "I look at the spider sa picture..."  Is the result "I picture (something)" or "I look at the picture".  Okay, so that was not the best example, but I hope you get the idea.  Maybe if we follow the first word by { <word type> } if there is some ambiguity then it would make it clearer.
    • Lojban, by the way, technically does not have "verbs", but we need not go into detail here.
    There is no set system for how much sa sa erases, but I would imagine that if I said "I saw the spider sa sa Ron..." then it would erase up to "I" (not "I saw Ron").
    Possibly, if one says "... sa .i si sa .i ..." it would erase up to two sentences ago.  ("... sa .i si sa .i si sa .i ..." is three sentences ago)  This is not guaranteed to be correct, but I think that it makes sense.
    • .i is the Lojban punctuation mark, and I think that we should use it with erasure just so we do not have to say "STOP" or "PERIOD" or "END" or some such (especially because it cannot be misinterpreted).
    Articles (the, a, an) following sa erase up to the last occurance of an article.  I am not sure how it would work for adjectives and adverbs.  In French I could see adjectives erasing up to the last adjective, but in English I think that one would have to follow it with the wanted noun anyway.
    Once again, I would group sas in twos or threes iff in large quantity.
    su = erases entire the discourse (probably just your own).  It is similar to "you know what, never mind...".
    If you use any of these in quotes, it erases only other material in that level of quotation-embeddedness.  If you think about it, this makes sense.  Presumably, the person being quoted does not know that they are being quoted (or does not know the text inbetween the quotes, at least).  So, in:
       "I went to the park" said George, "si si an office building.  Sorry about that."
      It is not "said George" that is erased.  It is "the park".  It works this way if there were further levels of quotation in a quoted text as well.
    One last thing.  As you may have noticed, it can be extremely difficult to understand the meaning of a statement (especially if verbal) when it includes Lojbanic words (a.k.a. jbovla).  For example, I above wrote "The (non-erasure) word that follows it replaces both the word immediately previous to si and the word "si" itself."  Did that first occurance of the single-word erasure-word actually delete my text (or at least was it intended to), or was it just a reference to the word of it?  In order to alleviate any of such problems, I introduce the word: zo.  This word quotes one word, and one word only, and this word is the one that immediately follows the word of zo.  It is kind of like saying "the word...".  It should only be used before jbovla.  I hope that this makes sense...
    • By the way, "I introduce the word: zo." can now be expressed as "I introduce the word zo zo".  Feel free to put the word following zo <<zo>> in quotation marks, or sme other punctuation, because they are not pronounced in Lojban and they may be helpful when being read.  I will use makeshft guillemets (I think that is the correct term).
    So, there you have it.  Tell me what you think.
    mu'o mi'e .krytic.
  • slobin:
    Some markup error near the link to jbotcan, all the following text appears in fixed font. Sad.

... mi na natfe sepi'o le xance ...

  • krilltish:
    Lol. Thanks for that one. I saw that something looked funny, but I could not figure it out.
  • krilltish:
    su is kind of like "scratch that, this is what we now need to know:..." (if something completely depends on up-to-date information and you are talking about it; but then it someone updates you, then use this).
They should probably have application only to your quotes, it is may be seen as rude to correct someone else. Also, especially in IMing, comments can go so quickly that your correction may be buried beneath zillions upon zillions of other people's. For example:
  • Me: I walked my dog yesterday.
  • Other: Really, where?
  • Me: si today.
  • Me: In the park.
I am not correcting "where?" to become "today.", but am saying "'yesterday' should be 'today', sorry."- then continuing on to answer the question of when.

Another thing not related to emotion but could be useful

krilltish:

  •  Possessives are useful tools.  Though more complicated in Lojban, they should not be so bad in English.
    The most basic is pe.  It says that the, in English, noun (and all of it's adjectives) that it is immediately preceding it is in some way related to the noun (and adjectives) immediately following it.  If I say "the house pe  (of) the dog", it probably means "Bingo's doghouse".  But it could mean "The dog lifted its leg up to a tree which was a descendant to another tree that lent its wood to the neighbor's door; and this neighbor owns a house, to which the aforementioned door is attached, which is next to the house that used to belong to my cousin.  My cousin's old house is the one which I specifically meant to be in relation with the dog by expressing zo <<pe>>".
    I could also say "the pe (of) the dog, house", which is synonymous to "the house pe the dog".  I like this one because it seems really unEnglish to me.  In Lojban I could also just delete out the pe in "the pe (of) the dog, house", because in tanru (compound sumti/ ~adjectival nouns) the words on the left somehow modify the word on the right (exactly as pe does, actually).  It may be helpful to think of pe as "...related, somehow/loosely, to..."
    • The desk pe William = the William pe desk = the William desk = William's desk
      • It probably does not mean that William owns it (more likely the business William works for does), but means that William sits there and does something to/on it.
    • Generally, "of" or "-'s" will work just as well.  I would use pe in texts similar to the examples about the dog(s) previously stated.
    po is a more strongly linking possessive.  It means that one object is uniquely possessed by another something (usually).  If you bought it, now own it, and can sell it- use this.  Once you do sell it, po may become pe, but no matter what po can no longer be used (when in relation to you; it can however be used for the person to whom you sold it).  I could say "the desk po William" (he owns the desk, maybe it is at his home), but cannot say (usually) "the desk po William and JoAnne" (pe could be used, however). 
    • joi (a connective, which are much to complex to get into here and/or now) may be used instead of the "and" in the immediately previous example.  joi means "and, in a grouping way; with; en masse"- so I could say "the desk po (uniquely possessed by) William joi (in a group with) JoAnne, when considered together" but then "the desk po William" would no longer apply.
    The last possessive is po'e.  This means "inalienably possessed by".  It means that no matter what you do, you cannot get rid of it- no matter how much you may want to do so.  You cannot sell it, you cannot throw it away.  It is yours, now and forever.  Use it when saying "the parents po'e (inalienable-of) me" (they will be my parents (especially if used in the biological sense) no matter what) or "the foot po'e my brother" (unless iff he is an organ donor, it is his foot.  If he is, then it is a debatable issue...).
    Thought they could be useful
    -- Gleki (talk) 17:10, 16 djunio 2014 (UTC)
    Krilltish

Elliptical Modifiers

krilltish:

  • .a'o .au Do not let the word "elliptical" scare you off.  It just means that it is a blank space in some category.  Lojban has a lot of such categories, but I am only going to go over two, which you should have seen before.
The first is ge'e.  It means "I feel (something)" and is the blank spot for emotions.  You can easily replace it by saying anyother cnivla (emotional-word), such as .ui.  Once you replace ge'e with a cnivla the meaning of the statement changes (here it changes to happiness about whatever).  Theoretically, one can combine it with pei (to get ge'epei or peige'e), but that just basically means the same thing as pei itself ("how do you feel about that").
The next is ju'a.  It can only be used as an evidential.  It basically means "I state (with unspecified evidence)".  If you combine it with pei (resulting in ju'apei or peiju'a), it asks for evidence.  You can replace it with any evidence that you so desire, and thereby, change the meaning of the statement (how much so is determined by the word used to replace it).
Neither of these words must be used in a statement (although ju'apei  could be useful), so I doubt that they will be used much.
Neither of these word means that you lack emotion/evidence (though they can), they just say that you do not want to go into detail about it.
co'o mi'e .kryltyc.

Pronounciation and more Lojban

krilltish:

  • I think that, by now, you should be introduced to the "correct" manner in which to pronounce jbovla.  I do not want to go into detail here, unless if someone asks me to do so, but I will provide a link to the Lojban for Beginner's lessons.  Read the first lesson for a *fairly* detailed (though not completely) description on pronounciation.  It should not take that long, is not that difficult to understand, may introduce you to he rest of Lojban (in all of its floral vibrancy), and will help you to correctly pronounce the words.  For more help and/or details, do a Google search and/or go to <a href="http://www.jbotcan.org/en">www.jbotcan.org/en</a> .
    <a href="http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less1.html">http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less1.html</a>

This Entry is Seriously Negative! [.uinaisairu'e to zo'o]

krilltish:

  • I thought that it would be helpful to introduce the Lojbani negation/negative system.  These words may be used anywhere in a sentence, although the easiest places are immediately before the verb, (possibly immediately after the verb and immediately before the next noun), and at the end of the sentence.  If they are used at the beginning of a sentence (unless iff the beginning is the verb) or inbetween two or more nouns, the must be followed by zo <<ku>>.
    na - the most basic and imprecise negative.  Use it especially if you have no relationship to the object through the verb.  For example, my mother does not know anything about Star Wars .uinaisai .oi.  So, when I ask if she actually liked the Ewoks in the sixth movie (no offense to Ewok-lovers), she can correctly respond as "I do no/na like the Ewoks".  Not becuase she has anything against them, but because she does not know about them.
    na'e - usually translated as "other-than".  It implies a relationship, just not the one stated.  I na'e like the Ewoks.  I know about Ewoks and have a relationship to them, but it is not liking them.
    to'e - the scalar opposite.  Use it when you feel/do/are the opposite of the verb.  I to'e like murderers, and .a'o you do too.
    • As per below (nai), it could be quite possible to put zo <<sai>> or other attitudinal modifiers after a negator such as to'e.  This would more accurately show my sentiment: I to'ecai like murderers. 
      • Of course, one may just use an attitudinal (Murderers! .a'unai .iunaisai .ii)...

        no'e - midpoint scalar negator.  Used when the verb's scale has a point exactly neutral on it when applied to the subject.  I no'e like the Ewoks.  I do not like them, but do not dislike them.

    nai - as far as I know, this can only follow another cmavo, or syntax word (not nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs), such as "and", zo <<.ui>>, and *possibly* other negators.  Do not put before a verb.

    na'e strictly Cniglic territory, but they are na'e that hard and are very helpful.
    -- Krilltish

Good-Byes/God Be wi'ye's

krilltish:

  • Rereading the introduction to the vocatives for parting, I have found that they may or may not have been terribly clear.  I will here attempt to alleviate the problem.
    zo <<co'o>> - Use this for any personal events- if you are there in real life and in a friendly setting, use it.  It means something like "see you later"; although interaction is over now, maybe you will see the other person again tomorrow.  This is the generic good-bye.
    zo <<fe'o - This is like "over and out", "the end", "I am done".  It implies no more communication until a designated time or unless if something in the situation changes.  Use it at the end of a book (series).
    zo <<mu'o - "Over".  It basically means that it the other person's turn to start speaking.  You will probably respond.
    New notation in Cniglic!  If you do use the guillemets as I do when "quoting" a word with zo <<zo>>, it probably is not necessary to use the last punctuation (if the quoted word is the last word in the brackets), because the brackets terminate the quote.   So in the last occurrence, I could have just said " zo <<zo ".  Or you could keep in both guillemets.  Of course, you do not have to use them at all, it just is easier to interpret.  It is all up to you.
    Please forgive me for the (mis)spelling, my keyboard here does not work amazingly well, and I might have missed something in spell check.
  • krilltish:
    In order to inform the inquirind mind, I used "God be wi'ye" as part of the title because that is the origin of the word "good-bye" and I thought it might be interesting/informative.

[fu'e] & [fu'o]

krilltish:

  • As some of you may have discovered, attitudinals, attaching to the previous word (including zo <<.i which makes it the entire sentence), can have certain annoying/hard to deal with effects. For example, if I was trying to say "George gave me the book about Lojban" and I was happy about and interested in everything after George (George may be neutral on my scale of happiness and interest), I could try to say "George gave .ui .au the book about Lojban" or "George gave me the book .ui .au about Lojban" or "George gave me the book about Lojban .ui .au". But those only mean "George gave me the book about Lojban" and I am both happy and interested in (respectively) the giving, the book, or Lojban. How do I say all of the above? If I was to write in the English, I would say "George gave me the book about Lojban; and the giving, the book, and Lojban all make me happy" or "George gave me the book about Lojban; and I am happy about the following: the giving, the book, and Lojban". I guess that I could also use "George gave .ui .au me the book .ui .au about Lojban .ui .au", but that is too complicated, not to mention tedious. In specific translations into English, from Lojban, one would use parenthesis or curly braces to group the words like so: "George {gave me the book about Lojban} and that (everything in curly braces) makes me happy"*. This last example is the answer for which we are looking. So how do you say these attitudinal-parenthesis in Lojban/Cniglic? For your convenience/enjoyment, and mine, I introduce zo <<fu'e and zo <<fu'o!

    How they work is as follows: Say anything that you do not want the cnivla to apply to, the normal rules apply. Then, immediately before the things about which you feel the cinmo (emotion(s)), insert zo <<fu'e. This starts the attitude-parenthesis. It operates kind of like zo <<.i, anything after it (but before the end of the attitudinal-parenthesis, which operates as another zo <<.i) has the emotion felt about them- treat it like a sentence break, kind of. Then, like zo <<.i, insert the cnivla that you feel, everything in this "sentence" has that emotion(s) attached to it. Say anything that you want (as long as it has <i>all</i> of the emotions that were expressed by the cnivla after zo <<fu'e able to apply to it truthfully when about you at that time). Other cnivla may be inserted after any words inside the attitudinal-parenthesis; they only apply to the immediately-preceding word, however (just as if it were a normal sentence). When you are done feeling these emotions about the stuff (even if there is a slight break- even a single word that you do not feel that way about) use zo <<fu'o. This closes the parenthesis. Say anything else as if it were its own sentence. I do not know what it means to say an attitude immediately following zo <<fu'o, perhaps that specifies how you feel about the emotion being over./? I do not know; but I will be sure to look it up/ask the Lojbanic community (la .jbopregirz.). The attitudinal-parenthesis automatically terminate at the end of an entire statement (if you are not going to talk anymore, or it is the end of the text/book).
    For example: George fu'e .ui .au gave me the books about Lojban ##(fu'o, although it is not necessary- the statement is considere to be over)##.
    This means that I feel happy and interested in anything after zo <<fu'e.
    Another example: George .iu fu'e .ui .au gave the book about Lojban .oinai fu'o to me.
    George, whom I love, {gave the book about Lojban, no complaints there} to me, where everything in curly braces I feel happy and interested about.
    I do not feel happy nor interested nor love nor complaintful/-empty** about myself, according to this sentence. Or, rather, my feeling toward myself is not expressed/specified here.
    By the way, the zo <<.ui and zo <<.au apply to everything inside the attitude-parenthesis. This includes "gave", "me", "the", "book", "about", and "Lojban". However, feeling happy and interested in "the" and "about" does not mean much and, fortunately, everything else is probably too (namely "me"). They also work with evidentials and discursives. I do not know about vocatives (Coi).
    • I would typically use parenthesis to group, but I knew that I would use them later in the sentence as well so it would be ambiguous (in which set of parenthesis do you group? Both?). Of course, from now on we will be haunted with this question (am I grouping write now or giving extra material inside these parenthesis?). I could just go with curly braces, but you never know. Incidentally, this is precisely why Lojban has some may different types of parenthesis compare to English.
      • Semi-joke. zo'o
    " ## " represents metalinguistic commentary about the statement.
    Please note: These groupers do not act as mathematical parenthesis: 2(x 3) = 2x 6.  But ".ui fu'e gave the books fu'o" does not mean "gave .ui the .ui books .ui".
    Also note that these groupers may be nested: "George fu'e .ui gave the fu'e .au books about Lojban fu'o before lunch fu'o to me" means that George {1 gave the {2 books about Lojban} before lunch} to me, in which anything in the first curly braces (including everything in the second pair as well) makes me happy and everything in the second pair of curly braces is interesting to me (but it does not specify that I am interested in anything else).
    They also may transcend quotes by the same person stated at around the same time (although if they are in them, they do not operate outside of them): "George fu'e .ui .au gave me" said Alice, "the book about Lojban fu'o."
    She still feels happy about and interested in the book and Lojban
    People typically do not know that they are being quoted.  If they do know that they are being quoted, they still might not know what is inbetween the quotes or where the quotes break and resume.
    General:  Other people may not feel one's own feelings, so these attitudinal-parenthesis will not apply to them or their quotes.
    General:  Words that operate within quotations only apply if used near in time with/to eachother and if used by the same person.
    "Attitudinal-parenthesis" may also be called "indicator-brackets" (a more general term).  I will attempt to use the term for the rest of this course.

  • mungojelly:
    I think we should use fu'e/fu'o a lot in Cniglic, where we don't have the precision of Lojban's grammar. It's the only way we have to show fu'e .ui ro'e precisely fu'o what an attitude is marking.
Thanks for fu'e .i'e .i'o keeping this group active fu'o. I'm planning to write a post soon .ai explaining more about my ideas for how we should develop Cniglic from here. I remember when I was last really active here I was still just starting to get comfortable with the attitudinals. Now I'm very fluent .o'a .ua with most of them. So I feel like I'm ready to help bring Cniglic to the next level .au .ai .ia .i'i.
  • krilltish:
    Inquiring at jbotcan.org, I have learned that one (who could that be? ;)) uses "fu'o ge'e" precisely in the same manner as "fu'e ge'e". Still, the topic is up for debate/discovery so use it however you want (just tell someone what it means).
  • I marked the Lojban phrases here with quotation marks because they are not meant to be taken for their meaning, just for the text. There are ways to do this in Lojban, but it may be out of the scope of Cniglic.
  • krilltish:
    fue si fu'e

This sentence is lie.

krilltish:

  • This sentence is lie.
    oiro'epei?  In English, one would fall into all kinds of fun paradoxes.  But, as one might have expected of a logical language, Lojban does not!
    "How does it avoid this problem?" you might be wondering.
    Well, I will tell you- without going into all of those really annoying and hard to understand logical constructions.  The word for it is zo <<sei.  It basically starts a commentary on a higher level from the rest of the sentence. It also only provides commentary, it does not influence the meaning of the sentence (although it may influence its acceptance), and the sentence can get along perfectly fine without it.
For example: "This sentence is a true statement sei false." (I had to change the wording slightly. For a more colloqial and paradoxical version: "This sentence is true: this sentence is false." or "The following sentence is true. The immediately preceding sentence is false.")
When finding whether a linear system is parallel, lacking a solution, or not a special case (meaining that the lines intersect): one may be able to reduce it to: 0 = 6.
This is not a solution, so one may write: 0 = 6 FALSE.
Now, you can use: 0 = 6 sei false.
In conclusion, zo <<sei is a word that talks about a sentence but operates on a higher level. Therefore neither of the two statements is affected/effected(?) by the other. No paradoxes arise, just a lack of trust.
This paper is all true and has been written by Krilltish (sei?) FALSE.

my vision [.ai] of a cniglic community [.i'i]

mungojelly:

  • I'd like to thank Krilltish for contributing to this group! .i'o sai. I hope that we can work together to dovetail our visions & make Cniglic into the friendliest and easiest introduction to Lojban on the net.
My goal with Cniglic is not just to create learning materials, but to create a self-aware Cniglic community .i'i. I imagine discussions of a wide variety of topics in Cniglic. People who are new to Lojban (or even eventually who are just interested in speaking Cniglic itself) could easily join the Cniglic speaking community, and begin marking their text with the first attitudinals they learned. It wouldn't be as much of a cognitive overload to immerse yourself in Cniglic text as in Lojban text. The same 39 scales repeating in every thread would quickly become familiar. So even newcomers to Cniglic could focus more on communicating & exploring than on trying to wrap their brain around the language.
Here are some values I think are important for the Cniglic community:
.o'a, pride. People who speak Cniglic can quickly master the language and communicate with confidence and fluency. Regardless of their level of knowledge (or even interest) in Lojban, they can be proud of knowing Cniglic well.
.i'i, togetherness. I would like for Cniglic to become a welcoming and friendly community. I believe that the qualities of the language itself-- displaying our emotions .ua ro'i and attitudes and evidence-- can help us to establish a space where emotions are accepted .o'u, and where we are aware of speaking to each other from our own perspectives.
ri'e, release of emotion. Confident in their technical ability to use the language, and comfortable with each other as an accepting community, I imagine the Cniglic community encouraging deep emotional expression and inventing new kinds of emotional communication. For instance I find it interesting to speak using only attitudinals (which I've started calling Cniban), speaking directly from a vague emotive place, connecting what I feel directly with the words: .ua ro'i .ua ro'e .ii .io .uu se'i .uo .o'u nai ru'e .ii ru'e .i'i nai ru'e .ui nai ru'e .o'o .o'o ge'e .i'i .o'u .ua ru'e ro'i .ua ru'e ge'e ri'e ge'e ri'e .i'i ri'e .ua
So if you don't mind, .e'a pei, I'm going to use this forum from now on fu'e .ai more to speak in Cniglic than about it fu'o. I'm going to especially post in Cniban .ai since I'm interested in exploring .a'u that. It's my belief that Cniglic will become more useful .ia and a fu'e .au better entranceway to Lojban fu'o the more we explore .ui & apply it.
<3,
selkik
  • krilltish:
    .ui .i'e .au .a'u .i'a
  • krilltish:
    By the way: of course you have permission! You created this community. You are the one who had the vision. I just kind of took over (coup ! zo'o .uinairu'e). Although I do believe that the community should be democratic- you do have an honorary place. Also, they specifically are your posts- nobody else's. You can do whatever you want in your posts.
The only thing is that, although you are proficient in Cniban, others may not be. So Cniglic should still contain running inroductory material fu'e a'o amidst all the future Cniban fu'o.
  • krilltish:
    Oh, and if you ocmpletely disagree (meaning you want me to stop), I will be happy to oblige- although it will be difficult and I will have the impulse to post about Cniglic (which I fu'e .uinai ku'i zo'onia may succumb to fu'o)

cniban

mungojelly:

ge'e ge'e
ge'e ru'e
.ui ru'e .ui nai ru'e
ge'e ge'e
ge'e sai
.o'u sai .o'u nai sai
ge'e
ge'e ru'e
.ui nai .au cu'i .i'u nai ru'e
.o'o cai
.o'o nai sai
.o'u .o'u nai ru'e .o'u
.ua .ua ru'e .ua nai .i'u nai
.ua nai .ua nai .ua nai ro'i .ua nai re'e
.ui ru'e .ui nai ru'e .ui re'e .ui ro'o
.ui ro'u .ui ri'e .ui nai ru'e .ui nai ri'e nai
.i'i nai ru'e
.uo ru'e
.uo sai

[zo a'o]

krilltish:

  • Recently, as I was driving in a parking lot (zo'o searching for a spot, not just for fun), I suddenly swerved. After swearing once or twice, my friend asked why I did it. I responded saying that I wanted to avoid some broken glass that I had seen. I, in a flash of thought, analyzed three possible follow-up sentences:
1) "I tried to put it between the tires."
2) "I put it between the tires. I hope."
3) "I tried to put it between a'o my tires."
I chose to go with the lattermost.
Why? The first sentence was too certain- it was a statement of fact. Although it says "tried", it implies that I did. The second and penultimate sentence is too uncertain, although more orrect. When someone says "I hope", too me at least, it means that they are fairly sure that the probabilit of it happening is near to none.
The last one was precisely what I wanted. It was a statement of fact. It said that I wanted the statement to be true, but also implied a level of confidence that I was looking for.
Just thought that I should include the thought. That is how I differentiate between zo a'o, "I hope", and just a statement.
mi'e .kriltic. mu'o (by the way, zo mu'o implies that I want you to respond .ui)

[zo na'i], one more negative.

krilltish:

  • "Do you still beat your wife?"
If someone asks you this, you do not answer "no". a'ocai You say "NO! I never did!".
You are saying that not only is the sentence untrue, but also that it presupposes something untrue. How do you say that the presupposition is false?
zo <<na'i. It negates both the sentence and its intuitive guess.

Humor and Genuinity

krilltish:

  • How does one express that their statement is to be taken as a joke or as serious?  One way to do it is by correctly attaching zo <<zo'o in the correct place.  This cnivla in its unaltered form expresses humor.  It can be taken as "lol", "do not take this seriously", or "this is a joke" (combined with zo <<ga'i, this last one may be taken contemptfully).

    However, with the addition of zo <<nai, it means that what you are saying, incredible and increduolous as it may be, that you are telling the truth.  Although most things that one says usually are interpreted to be true, this adds more effect to it.  It is kind of like attaching "I'm not lying" at the end of it.

    zo'onai Last night I spent six hours cutting paper into strips and then gluing there (individually) ends together.  (I was messing around with Moebius strips and their like.)

    Use zo <<zo'o for anything related to humor.  Laughing, telling a joke, etc.

  • krilltish:
    As I said before, zo <<zo'o can also be used for laughter, not just telling the joke. But if it is laughter, it might have the implication that you are laughing at your own joke (without a bad connotation).

A Brief [zo'o] Description As to How Cnivla Work

krilltish:

  • As mentioned before, cnivla affect only the immediately previous word. Here are some examples:
    (.i) .ui I am going to the park = I am going to the parl, and I am happy about it.
    zo <<.i ends one sentence and begins another. So, if a cnivla follows it, the cnivla applies to the sentence that is begun by zo <<.i
    I .ui am going to the park = I am going to the park, and I am happy that it is me (perhaps I was in a park-lottery).
    I am going .ui to the park = I am going to the park and I am happy that I am going (perhaps I escaped from jail and so can actually go).
    In Lojban (and hence, Cniglic- arguably (Cniglic is a hybrid)) "am going" is only one word/concept, and therefore a cnivla placed after either part of the verb applies to all of it. Speculation: Perhaps if it were placed after "am", it would imply that I am happy that the action is now happening (or is unspecified, as it is in this example). The ambiguity of English is evident here.
    I am going to the .ui green park = I am going to the green park, and am happy about it being both green and a park (perhaps I have only seen brown parks, or have only experienced my house)
    Please note that after any article, a cnivla applies to its entire noun (and all of its adjectives (which include number words/quantities)).
    I am going to the green .ui park = I am going to the green park and I am happy that it is green (implies only the brown park interpretation stated before).
    I am going to the green park .ui = I am going to the green park and I am happy that it is a park (specifies the aforementioned only-house interpretation).
    .ui I am going to the green zo'o park = I am going to the green park, and I am happy about all of it and am joking/finding it humorous that it is green (could be a snide remark?)
    I am going to the fu'e .ui green park (fu'o) = I am going to the green park, and am happy about it being both green and a park.
    Notice that this representation is the same as a prior statement
    I am going to the fun and fu'e .ui green park = I am going to a park that is both green and fun, and I am happy that it is green and a park.
    I am going to the fun .ui and green park = I am going to a park that is both fun and green and am happy that it is fun.
    I am going to the fun and .ui green park = I am going to the park that is fun and green, and am happy that it is both fun and green.
    I am going to the .ui fun and green park = I am going to the fu'e .ui fun and green park = I am going to the fun .ui and .ui green .ui park .ui = I am going to the fun and green park, and am happy that it is a park and that it is both green (which makes me happy) and fun (which also makes me happy).
    .ui I am going to the green and fun park = I .ui am (.ui?) going .ui the .ui green and fun park = I .ui am (.ui?) going .ui the green .ui and .ui fun .ui park .ui = I am going to the park that is both green and fun, and am happy that it is me and that I am going (with the unknownness of "am .ui" in the back of our minds) and that it is both green (which makes me happy) and fun(which also makes me happy).
    Notice that this is essentially the same statement as the first one
    zo <<na'i is a "cnivla" (loosely speaking), although it is closer to a discursive or evidential. It actually is quite a complex word with many, many uses. I will (possibly) post about it later- if no-one minds that I have basically hi-jacked this community. I really am sorry about it. I am interested in exploring Cniban- I just want to post about Cniglic as well.
    I do not know what it means to have a cnivla after a preposition (they do not exist in Lojban).

A poem

krilltish:

  • ge'esai
.uase'inai .e'icu'i .e'e.
.i'o fu'e .iu cnivla .i'ucu'i fu'o
.u'asai .uasai
ge'esai
  • krilltish:
    ku'i ju'ocu'i to la'anai toito .uizo'o to .o'anai .e'e to la'anai toitoitoi

True or False?:

krilltish:

  • Cniglic is also supposed to encompass discursives and evidentials, so I will introduce in this lesson a very useful discursive. The words is zo <<xu>> which roughly translates as "true or false?" or some version of the word "does". If used at the beginning of a sentence it functions basically in the same manner as "does". However, it has an interesting feature that English words do not have- this, I suspect, will be the more prominent, and (hence) useful, manner in which it will be utilized; probably for English's lack of the ability. This function is that, like any discursive, evidential, or cnivla, zo <<xu>> can be appended to the end of a word to ask a specific question with a specific response expected. For example:
xu You are Lucas' sister? = Are you Lucas' sister?
You xu are Lucas' sister? = Are you (or is it somebody else, such as that person over there) the sister of Lucas?
You are the sister xu of Lucas = {notice the inversion} Are you the Lucas' sister (or something else, such as his dog)?
You are the sister of Lucas xu = Are you Lucas' (or somebody else, such as that lady's) sister?
You are the sister xu of Lucas xu = Are you Lucas' (or that lady's) sister (or dog)?
One can probably ask a question about the word "of" or "the" as well.
Regardless of its position in the utterance, zo <<xu can only be answered (technically) in a handful of ways: Yes, na, na'e, no'e, to'e, I do not know, maybe, sometimes yes/no, or na'i. (I probably should have quoted those words, but I did not want to.)
The difference, though, is that those responses can more precisely indicate what is wrong (or correct, I suppose) with the questions proposition. If you ask the last example, and I say "na, yes", then you know that I am something to Lucas but not his sister.
xu You opine that this was a good addition to Cniglic?

The Name is Up for Debate

krilltish:

  • So, there recently was a post on www.jbotcan.org/en that brought up the debate on what the definition of zo <<cnivla>>. I generally only use it to mean attitudinals but some people use it to mean evidentials and discursives as well. If the latter is the case, then nothing here really has to change. However, if my (rather pedantic) view is deemed correct by consensus, then technically "Cniglic" only applies to how attitudinals are used in English while a different name would be used for Evidentialese and Discursivish. We won't be changing the name space, but how we use vocabulary in these posts might change. Some posters may use different vocabulary for different or similar or the same concepts. We might allow for this ambiguity- Lojban actually accepts vernacular ambiguity. Also, a name is a name and can mean whatever the user wants it to mean- so "Cniglic" may be used to apply to the entire list of concepts. It would be slightly misleading, but we have to live with it. Besides, we can always call "strictly attitudinal + English"-language by the word "Cinmyglic".
Give me your thoughts here or at jbotcan.
  • krilltish:
    Anonymous 08/12/23(Tue)18:06 No.734
Does the word cnivla cover discursives as well?
>> cnivla should cover all of UI and SEI. la.timos. 08/12/23(Tue)18:13 No.735
the word cnivla is not defined yet, but if i defined it, i would make it cover all words from selma'o UI - which includes discursives - and SEI.
>> .kriltic. 08/12/23(Tue)18:23 No.736
>>735
See, I would define it as more closely tied to emotion. I can see why the conflict exists. There should probably be an all-encompassing word for selma'o UI words... hmmmmm...
>> la.timos. 08/12/23(Tue)18:33 No.739
hmm, you have a point, too. so cnivla should be reduced to only cover UI1 and for the other categories, other terms should be coined.
>> .kriltic. 08/12/23(Tue)19:27 No.741
>>739
I think so. Maybe zo <<selsnuvla>> for "discursives". Actually, that sounds more like words that one would put in the topic heading... Maybe zo <<skuselpravla>> meaning "expression-production-type-of-process-words"?
"Evidential" is more difficult or lengthier. zo <<skuvelji'ivla>>? Maybe without the rafsi of zo <<cusku>>...
What would the whole category be? Perhaps zo <<ji'ivla>> or "opinion-words"? zo <<skuji'ivla>>?
>> Hussell 08/12/23(Tue)22:19 No.752
I had a look at the lujvo dictionary, and two of these concepts are already listed.
attitudinal: cnima'o (a cmavo is a valsi)
evidential: xusycmuma'o (xusra jicmu cmavo, "assert-basis structure-word") or zgama'o (zgana cmavo, "observe structure-word")
Maybe the whole category (indicators, free modifiers) could be gafma'o (galfi cmavo, "modify structure-word")?
Discursives could be called pikma'o (pinka cmavo, "comment structure-word").
>> .ie .i'e .kriltic. 08/12/23(Tue)23:12 No.753
>>752
Oooh, those are good.
I like zo <<zgama'o>> less than zo <<xusycmuma'o>>.
I think I may start using those, but we should pe'i wait for a larger consensus.
>> la.timos. 08/12/23(Tue)23:23 No.754
who the hell invented this crazy zo <<valsi stuff anyway!?
>> Hussell 08/12/24(Wed)01:50 No.755
>>753
Evidentials should have been called sitma'o (sitna cmavo, "cite structure-words").
>> florolf 08/12/24(Wed)03:02 No.756
why don't we just define {cnivla} as "attitudinal" and use {cinmo cnivla} to refer to "emotion attitudinals"?
>> Hussell 08/12/24(Wed)03:44 No.757
>>756
"Emotion attitudinal" is just as redundant as "cinmo cnivla" ("emotion emotion-word"), since "attitudinal" refers specifically to emotion indicators (UI1). Try instead "cnima'o" for "attitudinal" (UI1) and "gafma'o" for "indicator" (UI, CAI).
>> Anonymous 08/12/24(Wed)10:53 No.758
>>757
How about "gasma'o (ganse cmavo)" for UI in general?
>> UI Hussell 08/12/24(Wed)15:17 No.759
>>758
I'm not sure what ganse, "to sense", has to do with UI. Some of the evidentials involve sensing things, but others don't.
Names I considered for UI:
zifma'o, zifre cmavo, "free structure-word", because they can go almost anywhere
tcityma'o, tcita cmavo, "label structure-word", because they label the preceeding word
gafma'o, galfi cmavo, "modify structure-word", because they modify other words.
You could probably use any of these and be understood. I'm actually leaning towards zifma'o now, since many cmavo besides UI modify things, but few can appear so freely.
As always, I'm open to better suggestions.
>> .kriltic. 08/12/24(Wed)16:20 No.760
>>759
I too like zo <<zifma'o>>.
Question: can a person claim to have coined a jbobrivla (which does not include fu'ivla)?
  • mungojelly:
    I think "cniglic" as a cmevla is a different question from the lujvo "cnivla". As a lujvo, "cnivla" requires some social consensus. As a cmevla, "cniglic" doesn't even officially necessarily have to have anything to do with the rafsi "cni" and "glic". (I like how the name for Reddit, "putcid", is pu-tcid and not put-cid.) I chose the name "cniglic" because of my own thinking about how the attitudinals could be used to color english. There could be a lujvo "cniglico" ("cnigli"), but it would almost certainly mean something else.
Anyway regardless of that conversation, it seems to me anyway that I would rather see what's now Cniglic broken up more. I think of it this way: Evidentialese should be its own language, one of the first stepping stones. Discursivish (did you think of that btw? that's a good name) would probably be a good stepping stone too, although I haven't thought that one through as clearly. But the way I see it playing out is that (as a student of Lojban following this course) you've already learned Evidentialese by the time you begin studying Cniglic. So the evidentials are included in what people speaking Cniglic speak, but they're not the Cniglic-y part that you're learning then, if you see what I mean.
I'd like to start forums somewhere to make more of the detailed ladder that I'm imagining. I'm not sure if Livejournal is the best place? I like it here, but the Lojban stuff on Livejournal is usually pretty slow. But anyway in the end I'm not really aiming it at people who already speak Lojban, so I guess it's about how accessible & friendly it is for strangers. Somewhere chatty and easy to dip into, that's my priorities. Where do you think would be best?
Anyway, whereever they are, I'd like to make a few of them.. lessee.. the first one would be COI. Then Evidentialese. In the Evidentialese area we'd use both COI and the evidentials, like, coi, coi, how are you, i'm fine se'o, oh i'm glad se'o that you're fine ti'e. So the COI room is just to say hello, basically. (Maybe it would work with like a webforum, with the different rooms with threads.) Then you're starting to think and talk a little differently in the Evidentialese area. Then Discursivish could come next, and also includes still the evidentials and COI.
It's a big jump from there to all of Cniglic, but I'm not sure it's an unreasonable one. I did think of a possible inbetween rung there though, which would be a basic-cniglic vs the full advanced-cniglic. The basic one would leave out the categories and modifiers. But as I'm looking at it that doesn't make too much sense-- that's only like 16 words, and one of them is "zo'o" which is hardly advanced. :) So um. Those aren't good ideas, but there are some ideas, how about that. :)
So I think it's reasonable to give people three little easy rungs, COI, then Evidentialese, then Discursivish, and then if they want to keep going next take a big jump up to Cniglic. Cniglic will probably bloat until it has 200 words, even if we fight it, but whatever that'll still be smallish. My hope is for Cniglic to be a sort of living language, to have some spirit and character to it. And the first three rungs would be maintained more as a conscious tiny stairway for people to cautiously enter into the language.
They take one step on COI, and it's like: oh hello, welcome to the language. Take another taste, here's the evidentials, they're groovy. Then once you've got the evidentials, it's just a few more words to get the Discursives, we've got them in a habit and they've shown they're serious. So next a big jump. They'll be swimming just a little when we zoom them up into Cniglic, but it's still a very gentle cultural and linguistic immersion as those go. :)
I feel like it would make sense to use some sort of chat, especially at first, because it makes so much sense to teach the COI cmavo and yet-- what opportunity is there to use many of them, in a forum situation? (be'e.. be'e!? hello are you there?+!)
...ack, too long, CUT
Oh I do have some sketches for some post-cniglic stuff. One of the basic ones I've worked out-- and unfortunately overpromised to some peolpe that i'd start teaching already and haven't gotten back to them :) -- is the colors as a module. I think that would be great for the first brivla you learn. I sort of have been working out a vision of it as word-painting. Like all you're learning is a dozen gismu, and their rafsi.. what kind of conversations can you have with that few words? But my idea is to have the first few just be color words. Then you can have conversations like "crino .i xunre .i blanu .i xunre".. paint a conversation. "blanu .i blari'o .i crino". And if you learn Cniglic first before heading into brivla, then you've got those colors too. It's a very watercolor language. .i crino .iu .i blanu .uu .i pelri'o .i'u
I half-wrote a poem already in that language.. it's called xekri, and the words are xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri xekri, 37 xekri, plus also attitudinals inbetween. Like "xekri .iu xekri .i'u xekri .ii xekri .i'i", etc. You can perform it improvising the emotions. But I also plan to write some sequences down someitme.
Then after the colors I was thinking of animals and plants. That's a really broad one though. That's a sort of broadening out. It's gotta be big, you gotta take kind of big chunks if you're going to get all of the vocab of Lojban in. So there might be some smaller list of animals and plants that are expected before going on to the next level, after that, but then all of the animal names are around. Alot of them are obscure. I like zo arxokuna!! (raccoon). And I like zo djirafa (giraffe). I was thinking it would be good to pair teaching animal names with colors, because there's lots of colorful animal pictures, so like it would say "xunre cipni" for a red bird or "xekri gerku" for a black dog, and already knowing the color you would sort of have that balance of familiarity and newness.
Then from there I think it would be easy to add some other sort of vocabulary that would combine with the names of plants and animals to allow you to tell little stories about them. I dunno which ones would be good, maybe ones that have to do with physical actions, but I'm not sure how many of those there are or what they're like, hm... or well anyway, you can choose a few words to mix in with the animals and colors and make something exciting happen.
So those are most of my ideas about where to go from here. :)

.u'u ro'a .i'i bu'o .iu .ui .i'u .i'u nai

mungojelly:

  • .ui ro'a Hello!
.u'u I haven't written here in a long time.
.ai I'll write more.
.a'u Who's still here?
.i'i .o'u Let's chat.
<3,
la stela selckiku
aka
mungojelly
aka
brett
  • krilltish:
    I am.

Arrogant Superiority

krilltish:

  • coi doi cniglipre .i pei? Hey, guys! What's up/how've you been?
    If you were a malevolent .a'onai monarch .a'osai to zo'o toi, how would you address your poor .u'u subjects? Well, you think that you are fu'e .uinai .oiro'a bigger than them fu'o (which is true, zo'o iff we are talking about your head), right? I mean, you have the authority of God behind you! You were selectly chosen to operate as their chief of rule! And here are these worthless peasants, .uu .u'icu'i splattered in mud, begging you to save their cows or some such.
    Some useful words might be:
    · zo <<ga'i>>, a word suffixed to another cnivla in order to make it pretentious, arrogant, or big-headed.
    · zo <<uunai><uunai></uunai>>, meaning "cruelty". Perhaps attach lu <<to fu'e .ui zo'o gu'o ga'i to><to toi="" ui=""></to>> li'u so that it has one of those ringing, superior laughs attached.
    · zoi .jbocumki. <<mua'a'a'a'a> .jbocumki.; although this is an experimental cmavo, and it may not even be a cnivla, it is the cruel laugh "mwahahahaha!" (feel free to insert an echo).
      • Notes in response to "useful words", the second entry: zo <<zo'o>> is more like " :P ". It is not actually a laughing sound (or a laugh, if there is a difference). Unless if it is a little hinting chuckle in your head, perhaps.  Also, please notice that I did not include the glottal stop / period / denpabu (" . ") before zo <<uu>>.  I have taken to leaving it out whenever possible iff the initial vowel is a(n) .ibu or .ubu and iff they are operating in a diphthong.