From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Mon May 28 20:31:06 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Mon, 28 May 2007 20:31:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HssQL-0004wR-Go for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Mon, 28 May 2007 20:31:05 -0700 Received: from phma.optus.nu ([166.82.175.165] helo=ixazon.dynip.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HssQI-0004wG-TC for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Mon, 28 May 2007 20:31:05 -0700 Received: from chausie (unknown [192.168.7.4]) by ixazon.dynip.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E693ACEB0C for ; Mon, 28 May 2007 23:30:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: dicussions about basic vocabulary Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 23:30:57 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5 References: <1180372489.465b0e096a5aa@ssl0.ovh.net> <2f91285f0705281533h51eddf87r2923c354eb109f51@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <2f91285f0705281533h51eddf87r2923c354eb109f51@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200705282330.57683.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-Spam-Score: 0.5 X-Spam-Score-Int: 5 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 4764 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Monday 28 May 2007 18:33, Vid Sintef wrote: > I, too, had been naively thinking it should be ok if I treat gismu as > "noun" or "verb" or "adjective" in accordance with their English > translations; but I regret, because that didn't realy help improve my > understanding of Lojban. It might also become a stumbling block to one's > future progress if he falsely gets used to that idea at an early stage of > learning. My suggestion is that every Lojban learner must be aware, from > the beginning, of the fact that gismu is not "noun" nor "verb" nor > "adjective"; it's "gismu". Actually the part of speech is the brivla; gismu is a morphological class of brivla. The closest thing in natural languages to the brivla is the verb. It's not a good idea to treat brivla as nouns or adjectives in accordance with their English translations. They are all brivla; it is just as valid to say {le xekri cu mlatu} as {le mlatu cu xekri}. It would be better to show them doing verblike things, such as having tense (ta pu zdani mi). Also, if you show any tanru, emphasize that the seltau is not an adjective (there is no such thing in Lojban) and the tertau is not a noun. They are both brivla. Pierre