From cowan Thu Oct 19 11:58:42 1995
Subject: Re: NAI
From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List)
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 11:58:42 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199510182350.TAA23378@locke.ccil.org> from "ucleaar" at Oct 18, 95 07:30:44 pm
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la .and. cusku di'e

> On what grounds is {nai} deemed a word rather than a suffix?
> It has an idiomatic semantic relationship with the word it
> attaches to, and it can attach to syntactically invisible words
> (UI), so that {gie oi nai} = {gie} rather than {gie nai}.
> These considerations lead me to conclude that {nai} is a
> suffix rather than a word. Slightly more tentatively, I
> conclude that there is no selmao NAI. If I am right, we discover
> a new kind of morphology in Lojban.

Parser input:	nai
Parser output:	(nai /FA'O/)

As shown above, "nai" is a valid stand-alone text.  Admittedly, this is
a marginal use of "nai", and most uses are indeed suffixal.

-- 
John Cowan					cowan@ccil.org
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.