[lojban-beginners] Re: Quick Reference Guide for language words

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 10/27/07, Joel Shellman <jshellman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > sumti: an argument in a sentence.
>
> I'm going to say "argument to a selbri in a bridi" as that can be
> stated without qualification, I assume.

That's correct as a definition of what the Lojban word {sumti} means.

It's not quite right as a description of how the word "sumti" is used
as jargon in English when talking about Lojban. We normally tend to
use "sumti" to talk about a type of construct, such as {mi}, {lo mlatu},
{lo nu mi klama}, etc, whether they are being arguments to any selbri
or not. Roughly that corresponds to "noun phrase" in English, which
may be used as arguments of verbs but also in several other functions.

For example, in {xu do pu djuno la'e di'u doi lo mi pendo}, we would
say, in English, that {di'u}, {lo mi pendo} and {mi} are "sumti", even
though they are not the arguments to any selbri, so they are not being
sumti in the Lojban sense of the word, only in the English jargon sense
of the word.

mu'o mi'e xorxes