From - Tue Sep 30 10:31:59 1997 Message-ID: <34310581.57E8@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 10:03:10 -0400 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: Simple Lojban questions References: <199709300057.TAA06099@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1646 la xorxes. cusku di'e > In fact, the most difficult one would be to translate "my then wife". > For example, how would we say: "I gave the cat to my then wife"? > Now that I think about it, I don't know whether in {mi pu dunda > le maltu le mi ca speni} ca means at the time of speaking or at the > time of the giving. The latter. Tenses in subordinate bridi (and a description is essentially a condensed form of subordinate bridi) are relative to the tense in the main bridi. To capture "my present wife" you would use "le mi nau speni"; "nau" always means "here and now" un-relatively. > >Also, as I understand it, "sampli" has a definite > >meaning, unlike the ambiguous "skami pilno". Are such lujvo always > >unambiguous, or are they only unambiguous when they happen to be > >specifically defined in the dictionary? > > They will be unambiguous once they've had enough usage that we can > determine their meaning. For the time being we can say that the speaker > intended it to have an unambiguous meaning. If it catches on, that's what > it will end up meaning. Well put! > > However, if I begin > >typing a lot of Lojban in the future, the Dvorak style may not be > >optimum; after all, Dvorak designed his layout to be optimal for the > >English language. > > You must be joking. Indeed. However, Dvorak is probably as good or better for Lojban than for English: it puts the vowels on the home-row, and Lojban is more vowel-rich than English. Qwerty is only suitable for typing slowly. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban