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

["Adam D. Lopresto" <adam@pubcrawler.org>]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Jorge Llambías wrote:

> 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.

Another way to put it is that in English we (well, I) use "sumti" where in
Lojban {ka'e sumti} would probably be more appropriate.  But without an
explicit CAhA, I don't think it's too far wrong; it's just one of the rare
cases where {ka'e} is implicit instead of {ca'a}.
-- 
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

Red meat is NOT bad for you. Now, blue-green meat, that's REALLY BAD
for you.  --Tommy Smothers