I don't see a colon in the original
text. Just a period for the pause after ranjit. In any case, I
don't particularly like it, but that may be just me. As far as the
letters go, yes that's a perfectly valid way to refer to a previous
sumti. Without using the "goi" assignment, it's assumed to
refer to the last sumti starting with the letter. For example:
le gerku pu kalte le mlatu .i gy co'a
tatpi
The dog stalked the cat. G (the dog)
became tired.
--gejyspa
From:
lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org [mailto:lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org] On Behalf Of Vid Sintef
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 8:20 AM
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re:
the ".i" after "lu"
(To Karl Naylor...) Yeah,
that makes sense. Thank you.
Another question of mine is how grammatical is the use of colon as a
substitution of selbri like "cusku".
".i la ranjit: lu .i .e'epei zo'o do ca klama la jipci li'u" is an
example again from Lojban For Beginners.
Also many sentences presented on Texts in
Lojban have this usage, as well as their arguments (i.e. the x1 of
"cusku") being substituted by a series of upper case letters like
"A" or "B" after its proper cmene have been stated:
"lo ninmu: [...] lo nanmu: [...] A: [...] B: [...]"
Is this assignment of letters as grammatical as that of "ko'a" or
"fo'a"?
On 5/18/07, Karl
Naylor <karl.org@gmail.com>
wrote:
On 18/05/07, Vid Sintef
<picos.picos@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Along the course "Lojban For Beginners" I saw sentences with the
direct
> quotation word being followed by the sentence terminator ".i",
like this:
> la ranjit cu cusku lu .i mi djica lo bakni cidjrkari .e lo sluni nanba
li'u
> On the other hand, there are also sentences without ".i" after
"lu":
> la ranjit. pu cusku lu la djiotis. pu rinsa mi li'u
> What is the difference between them?
Beginner myself, but perfectly confident about my answer here. Put
simply, "lu .i (...) li'u" means that Ranjeet really did say
".i", and
conversely.
If you mean to ask why he sometimes says ".i" and sometimes not, I'd
imagine he uses a sentence separator when someone (himself or
otherwise) has just spoken, to be clear he's starting a new sentence
and not appending to the last one. However, I'm at work just now and
don't have time to check. It may also just depend on Ranjeet's mood,
or the authors may just have forgotten to put it in :) Does that
make
sense?