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Subject: Re: [lojban] What can you do with Lojban that you can't do with English?
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> ta nelci lo ta gerku
>
> vs.
>
> S/he likes his/her dog.

That doesn't quite mean that but yes, the demonstratives can refer to
things or people.

It actually means "what I'm pointing at like the dog of what I'm
pointing at" but those pointed-at things don't need to refer to the
same thing. Using [ri] would solve that problem.

>Could someone tell me what Lojban can do that English cannot and show an example so it's easy for me to understand?

Well, Lojban is simply more precise, sometimes, however, at the cost
of being more wordy, but it does let you say some pretty interesting
things with much fewer words. [ju] et al. come to mind right away: {lo
palci seju nanmu} "a/the man who is a man, whether or not he is evil",
{lo gendra ju smudra}, "the grammatically correct thing whether or not
means the right thing".

Tenses combined with logical connectives can produce interesting
results too: [do obabo mi citka lo plise] "If I eat an apple later,
then you eat an apple now, and if you eat an apple now, then I eat an
apple later.

lujvo, too, are a pretty interesting concept: they are compounds
defined by preset affixes assigned to certain root words or grammar
words. Properly formed, non-metaphorical ones can be almost perfectly
understood even if one has never encountered the word before. For
example, we can decompose the lujvo {lekri'ami'i} into the root words
{lenku rinka minji} which is a phrase compound that almost certainly
means {minji lo ka rinka lo nu lenku} "machine of which the purpose is
to physically cause [something] being/becoming cold", so "fridge" or
"air conditioning".

mu'o mi'e la tsani

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