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[lojban-beginners] Re: beginner questions

Quoting Steve Salkin <steve@salkin.org>:


ni'o lei se morji be mi cu kalsa mutce
which seems to parse
<start paragraph>the mass of memories I recall are chaotic in aspect
extremeness.
I would have thought it would work:
ni'o lei se morji be mi mutce kalse (are extreme in property disorder).

Any thoughts appreciated.
Both ways seem valid to me. Since brivla are more general purpose than things like adjectives or adverbs or verbs that other languages have, this situation where you can easily use either word as the main word of the sentence is much more common in Lojban. :)
You might have keyworditis with the word "mutce." It looks and often works like English "much." Really though it's not just one part of speech, it has all of the power of a gismu in it, and some of that power is being used here. The gismu "mutce" provides all of us Lojbanists .i'i with three different places:
loi mutce, the first place, is those things which are muchful. In the first place of mutce goes a thing which is extreme in some property.
loi se mutce is those things which are properties in which things can be extreme. Just about any property is a "se mutce," wouldn't you say? (Especially when us crazy monkeys get involved.)
loi te mutce are the actual extremes. That is, lo mutce is someone who is becoming so lo se mutce that they are getting towards actually becoming lo te mutce!
So the memories in this bridi are part of lo mutce, they are "muchers," who do something muchly. What they do muchly isn't specified in the sentence by sumti, but it's implied through the tanru (tanru = the way the words "kalsa mutce" relate to each other side-by-side).
Since the memories are also part of lo kalsa, the chaotic things, you could also say that they are "mutce kalsa," chaotic in a way somehow associated with being extreme. 



(2) Do people really find constructions that mix speaker's time and
sentence time to be fine in usage? For example, "mi puzuze'a gunka" from
LFB; would the usage "puzuku mi ze'a gunka" seem more awkward in Lojban?
While I don't find it so awkward to have the time and space both given
in the same spot, having two different kinds of time orientation given
together like that is still feeling very odd to me.


Oh my, well, Lojban tenses can do far more confusing things than that.

"puzuze'a" means "a long time ago for a while", doesn't it?
The way tenses feel to me is like they are tags, they tag a sumti & place the sentence relative to it. If there's nothing attached to the tag, then what's generally implied is that it's relative to the actual present. (There are other implications possible, such as story time.)
So if I hear: ".i pu broda" the 'pu' feels to me like it's 'really' tagging something unsaid, perhaps "lo nu mi cusku dei" (the event of me saying this very sentence). :)
I also feel like tenses belong to a large family of cmavo that do various things to bump around a sentence. That is, there are grammatically different qualities of tenses and say ca'a/ka'e or the evidentials se'o/ti'e/etc, but to me they all have this quality in common of being words you throw in to color the sentence. 



(3) I understand from a comment in LFB or What is Lojban? that xamgu is
not a general replacement for English "good." vrude is suggested when
one wishes to have a person in the x1 place of xamgu. My questions are,
can I understand vrude in the sense of "arete" - the attic greek term
victorian translators liked to render as "virtue?" Secondly, is "do
xamgu gerku" all right for "good dog"/"you're a good dog" or is this
more of a case for an attitudinal like ".ui do gerku" or ".ui gerku"? Or
something else?
The best way to understand gismu is in terms of their place structure. "xamgu" has this second place, what something is good FOR. So if you say that something is "lo xamgu", it's reasonable then to ask, ".i ma se xamgu", and what is the se xamgu then? And what is it good FOR?
So it would make sense to say "do xamgu" to a gerku if you were saying, for instance, good job doing something. You are good-- at doing that trick.
"loi vrude" on the other hand is those who are morally good, and there is just one other place, the standard by which the goodness is judged. So this isn't a goodness at doing something in particular, it's just being good as an overall property that can be judged.
You can use "vrude" for just about any sense of virtue. Whatever standard you want can be put into (or implied in) the se vrude, for instance: "le ka vrude be le se citri xelso", the virtue of the Greeks of history.
".ui gerku" means: "A dog! That makes me happy!" and ".ui do gerku" means: "You're a dog! That makes me happy!" Those are both reasonable to say.
"do xamgu gerku" means: "You are a dog which is somehow associated with being-good-for-something-ness." You can say that and I think your dog will know what you mean. 

<3,
brett