lo selma'o ca'irvei (selma'o Documentation)

Purpose of this document

To explain each of the selma'o (grammatical classes for function words); to give a detailed, readable explanation of each selma'o-'s purpose, syntax, and scope. It is intended for intermediate-to-advanced students of Lojban, and as a reference.

Glossary

bridi: Clause. Each bridi represents a particular predicate relation.

brivla: Predicate-word / content-word. brivla are a rather unique feature of Lojban. Each brivla is defined by a particular concept or relation, and has a defined place structure. Depending on position, brivla can act as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs; they tend to hold most of the semantic content of Lojban text.

cmavo: Structure/function word. cmavo in Lojban may begin with a consonant or a vowel, but have no consonants otherwise. They perform many purposes, including but not limited to articles, prepositions, pronouns, and numbers. Each cmavo belongs to a selma'o, which defines its grammatical nature.

famyma'o: Terminator cmavo. These cmavo are rather unique to Lojban, and act to "close off" expressions started by other cmavo, in order to maintain syntactic unambiguity. Each famyma'o is designed to close expressions from one particular selma'o. famyma'o are typically omitted when they are not needed. Due to their nature, famyma'o tend to be the sole member of its selma'o.

selbri: Predicate; roughly "verb / verb phrase". Each bridi is centered around exactly one selbri, but may contain other bridi that have their own selbri. The selbri defines how the sumti are related to each other.

selma'o: cmavo class. All cmavo in each selma'o are grammatically interchangeable -- a cmavo can be replaced by another cmavo in the same selma'o without affecting the syntactic structure of the sentence. selma'o are each named after an archetypical member cmavo, and conventionally is written in all caps, e.g. BAI. Apostrophes are "capitalized" to lowercase h, e.g. ZAhO. Since in some cases cmavo may be grammatically interchangeable but perform significantly different functions, selma'o may be further divided into sub-selma'o for convenience, denoted by numbers after the selma'o name, e.g. UI2.

sumti: Argument; roughly "noun / noun phrase". sumti are the subjects and objects of the bridi-clause.

BAI

Roughly equivalent to prepositions. More specifically, it adds a new place for a sumti to the current bridi. This is useful if the place-structure of the selbri lacks a place for a concept you want to express.

Each cmavo in BAI is an abbreviation of fi'o X [fe'u]. X is unique to each BAI-cmavo, and is a defined brivla from the Lojban lexicon. For mnemonic purposes, each BAI-cmavo resembles its parent brivla. For example, the parent of bai is bapli ("to force/compel"), while the parent of ja'e is jalge ("result"). Example sentences:

do plipe bai mi = do plipe fi'o bapli mi: I force you to jump. [lit. you jump, forced by me]

do plipe ja'e lo nu do farlu = do plipe fi'o jalge lo nu do farlu: You jump, causing you to fall.

By default, the "imported" place is always the first place of the parent brivla. If a different place is desired, BAI-cmavo can be preceded by SE-cmavo. For example, se ja'e would instead take the second place from jalge, which would be a cause instead of a result. For example:

do farlu se ja'e lo nu do plipe = do farlu fi'o se jalge lo nu do plipe : You fell because you jumped.

BAhE

BAhE-cmavo modify / mark the immediately-next word; they otherwise do not affect the syntactic structure of the text.

There are only two cmavo in BAhE: ba'e, which emphasizes the next word, and za'e, which marks the next word as "nonce", i.e. either a non-standard neologism or an existing word not quite used the way that it is officially defined (i.e. slang).

la ba'e .djordj. cu klama le zarci: George goes to the store / It's George who goes to the store.

u'e ko catlu ta poi za'e cifnu: Wow! Look at that baby! (za'e marks the slang-word "baby"; its meaning would depend on context and the shared culture of the speakers)