Message-ID: <439C4CC4.6000507@bilkent.edu.tr>
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 17:59:00 +0200
From: robin <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>
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To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Possesives in lojban
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Dmitry wrote:
> Hi, everybody, nice to talk with you. A week ago I began to learn Lojban 
> again, after a two years pause (-;
> So, I have simple question.
> 
> There is an exercise on possessives, convert "pe" to nested form
>  le cukta pe le ninmu -->
> 
> I offered:
>  le le ninmu cu cukta
> 
> Is it wrong? Answers page says "You can't do this (for now): le le ninmu 
> cukta is ambiguous.". But how about "cu"?
> 
> 
That would make "le ninmu" the first place of "cukta", so "le ninmu cu 
cukta" would mean "the woman is a book", and putting another "le" in 
front of that would be ungrammatical, or at least very strange. You can 
say something like "le nu le ninmu cu cukta", but this would mean 
something like "the event of the woman being a book", which again is not 
what you want.

If you aren't too concerned with precision, you can just say "le ninmu 
cukta", but that does not specify that it's any particular woman's book 
- it could be a book written by a woman, a book written for women, a 
book about women, or anything else you can think of involving "ninmu" 
modifying "cukta".

robin.tr