[lojban-beginners] Re: introduction and questions

[mungojelly@ixkey.info]

Quoting Robert Dumond <sinistermoo@gmail.com>:

> coi rodo
>
> mi'e rabert.


coi doi rabert.

 -- Hello, Robert.

mi'e. bret.

 -- I'm Brett.

fi'i do noi ca nenri pe'a la lojbanistan. .i'unai

 -- Welcome to you, who now are inside of-- figuratively speaking,  
since it's not an actual place-- the mysterious Lojbanistan.


> I've been learning Lojban through websites, Parallels 2, and the *Lojban for
> Beginners* book for about a few weeks now.


.i mi ze'u ru'inai tadni la lojban.

 -- I've studied Lojban for a long time, but not continuously.

.i se'o mi na certu .i ku'i mi troci

 -- I don't feel that I'm an expert, but I try.


> "I want to hear my baby talk"
>
> .i mi djica mi tirna le mi cifnu tavla


Lojban has a beautiful grammar which is capable of many incredible  
things.  It's necessarily complex, to have such power.  You are going  
to have to swallow some strange ideas, and you're going to be  
corrected often, in order to understand how to put together Lojban's  
sentences properly.  Trust us that there is a meaning to this madness.  
:)

In order to put together the kind of sentence you're asking for here,  
where one relationship (the wanting) is about another relationship  
(the hearing), you need what here in Lojbanistan we call an Event  
Abstraction.  There are a handful of words that do this, but the one  
you should learn about first is "nu".  The word "nu" allows you to  
take a relationship, such as you hearing your baby talk, and talk  
about that relationship itself considered as an event.

Grammatically what happens when you are going along saying a sentence  
and then you say "nu", is that you are given a whole new sentence to  
describe the event you're talking about.  You say: I want the/an event  
of... "mi djica lo nu..." and now you're talking about the event that  
you want, which you can describe using another full bridi.  Lojban's  
grammar is fully recursive here-- you can say "mi djica lo nu mi djica  
lo nu mi djica lo nu mi djica", "I desire that I desire that I desire  
that I desire", or for instance you can say "mi djica lo nu no'a",  
which is like a repeating decimal of "mi djica lo nu"s extending to  
infinity.

Back here on Earth, all you've asked Lojban to do is say that you  
desire an event of hearing something:

.i mi djica lo nu mi tirna ...

Hear what?  Hear your child talking, which is also an event:

.i mi djica lo nu mi tirna lo nu lo mi cifnu cu tavla

We need a "cu" in there.  The word "cu" is pronounced "shoo" and what  
it means is if someone says you're missing a terminator you can say  
"cu" and maybe they'll go away. :)  Actually what "cu" means is "hey  
watch out! selbri coming up here!" and it's often clearer & easier  
than terminating whatever you were in the middle of.  (In this case  
you could say "lo mi cifnu ku tavla" instead, where the "ku" matches  
the "lo".)

It's not arbitrary or pointless that you need to put a separator  
there!  What it really is, is part of the magic of "tanru", Lojban's  
fantastically extensible answer to adjectives & adverbs.  It'll take  
us a little while to explain, but once you have a feeling for how a  
tanru happens, it will be plain that "lo cifnu tavla" is a talker, a  
tavla, who is somehow related to babies.  So something has to split up  
the tanru in order for it to be read as a baby who talks, and that's  
"cu"'s job.


.i zo'oru'e mi djica lo nu lo do cifnu cu tavla fo la lojban.

 -- (Kidding a little,) I desire an event of your baby talks in  
Lojban! ("fo" for fourth place, because the fourth place of "tavla" is  
the language spoken.)


> That's it for now, I think.  I thank you all for any help in advance, and I
> hope to be more than a lurker on this list in the future.

fi'i ke'u

 -- Welcome again.

.i .a'o ko gleki tadni la lojban.

 -- I hope that you will happily study Lojban.


mu'o mi'e la bret.