Date: Sat, 19 Sep 92 03:02:09 -0400
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9209190702.AA00759@daily.grebyn.com>
To: nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au
Subject: old comments
Content-Length: 2150
Lines: 43

Re: Your comments a month ago in response to Amanda Babcock

>fi'i drai,ad. mi gleki lenu do cfari lenu cilre loi lojbo .i xu do
>jikydjuno fi la silvian.  RUtiser. noi mrilu se judri le la MEriland.
>balcu'e

I don't know whether she answered this.  Amanda actually IS a student at
U. of Maryland.  Sylvia is a graduate from a couple of years ago, who
has access through Dave Young, who works for a professor at UMd part
time.  Sylvia of course now lives in Virginia, about 15-20 miles from
the university.  We've tried to get Amanda, and the 100 other people on
our DC area mailing list (UMd is in the DC area, just on the opposite
side of the city from beautiful Fairfax VA), to particpate in classes
and the weekly conversation/text sessions, but thus far unsuccessfully.
Amanda had been planning to particpate in Athelstan's planned class over
in Md, that of course isn't likely to happen for a long while.

The large number of students (mostly SF fans with no budget who live
over in Maryland) who for reasons of time and money cannot regularly get
over here to the Virginia side of the city, is a long term problem in
getting the community together.  But then we sometimes have trouble
getting people only 10 miles away to come over regularly.

>>Why does it start with "coi la tcidu"... tcidu is a gismu, right?  Does "la"
>>put tcidu into the "vocative case"?
>
>{la} is not compulsory --- any gismu or cmene after {coi} --- or
>something of the same grammatical category, like {fi'i} above --- is
>vocative.  The {la} is optional, and to my knowledge, entails no meaning
>change.

Correct but perhaps incomplete.  The time when you need "la" is when
vocatively addressing multiple people:  coi. la djan. .e la meris.
but *coi. djan. .e meris. for the obvious morphological reason.  So we
added the "la" construct to expand the set of possible vocatives.

lojbab
 Hmm.  Actually the reason is more than morphological, since "e" joins
sumti, and basre names without "la" are not sumti.  So that last wording is
not accurate. 

(Note that I did not cc this.  IT has been too long and the points are too
minor for me to make a big deal of it.)