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From: Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: lojban qua lingua franca
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--- Andrew Archibald <archibal@math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> What I find difficult is grasping the grouping operators.  I very
> often find myself wanting simple general-purpose parentheses.  For
> example, to produce something like "the yogic flyer" you have to use
> {be}: {le volfli be le makfioga be'o}.  At least, I think so; I can't
> find any such usage in the CLL but I can't find any other way to do
> this and people have claimed it's right.  

{le makfioga vofli} would be the most direct translation, assuming
{makfioga} is the right word for what you want. (Is yoga magic?)

(BTW, {volfli} is a lujvo from {vofli fliba}, so almost the
opposite of {vofli}.)

...
> My impression is that there are too many special-case grammatical
> objects, that is, that the syntax is too closely linked to the
> semantics for the language to be as simple to learn as it could be. 

Yes, there are about 120 selma'o, way too many. Fortunately a good 
number of them are never or hardly ever used, so you don't actually 
need to learn them all to have a good command of the language.

> I
> think most cmavo could be given gismu-like standardized grammar (in
> fact, exactly gismu-like in that they would have place structures and
> be used in the same way) apart from a short list of purelsy structural
> cmavo to indicate grouping.  But probably such a simple language would
> be cumbersome to speak; in any case, since I do not speak lojban well,
> it's foolish for me to think about improving on it. 

There are two big classes of cmavo with semantic content: One is UI
and the other is BAI plus the whole battery of tenses. I don't know
if I'd turn these into gismu, but I would approve of putting all tenses 
and BAI into one selma'o. See:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Internal+grammar+of+tags

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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