[lojban-beginners] Re: go'i / ri

["Brett Williams" <mungojelly@gmail.com>]

On 8/13/08, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/13/08, Brett Williams <mungojelly@gmail.com> wrote:

a very good exposition of "ri" and "go'i".

ki'e za'e si'asku
 

A minor point though:


>  "ri" is a pro-sumti.  Pro-sumti have some interesting characteristics:
[...]

> - They terminate selbri.

Except when they don't ;) e.g. "broda be ri" or "me ri".

Yes that could be misleading, sorry. 

Here's another way of getting at what I was trying to say: A lot of the  words in Lojban, like all of the brivla (AKA all of the words that mean much of anything), come pre-wetted with this weird invisible tanru glue.  They stick to each other.  They stick to many cmavo.  They'll stick to most anything.  It's useful because you don't have to say a bunch of structure words *all* the time to make a sentence in Lojban come together: mostly you just throw it up together & it sticks together all on its own.  But if that's mostly all you're working with, it can get to be a mess: You need to come through chopping and hacking with "ku"s and "cu"s just to keep things from all forming into one indistinct blob. 

Pro-sumti, comparitively, are much less sticky.  They have a refreshingly solid texture, amidst the tanru-sticky brivla and the taffy-pulling LEs and BEs.  When you say a pro-sumti, either you are in a context such as "be", "me", a BAI, the secret invisible place after "lo", etc, where you need a sumti, in which case, bam, no fooling around, you got it, or if there's no context or tag then you put that sumti into the next available slot in the open bridi, bam, just like that. 

Brivla have an inherent open-end to them, a question: Is this selbri finished yet, making this the tertau and defining the structure of the bridi, or are we going to continue to another brivla (or  selbri cmavo), reducing what's already been said to a seltau?  Gadri and BEs and BAIs and NUs and most other constructions are also about opening up questions, making space for a reference or description.  Pro-sumti are in the business of answering questions, not asking them.  They terminate implicitly simply by tying up a loose end completely; in answering their own question (what's in the "fe" place, mu'a) they also answer other questions (yes, that really is the tertau, mu'a). 

A healthy balance of pro-sumti keeps one's sentences fresh & healthy, pe'i.  "ku" and "cu" are bland blank words, which is fine  when bland & blank is what you're aiming for at the moment.  (It's simple to understand, for instance!)  When you want a rich dense sentence, I think it's best to mostly arrange it so your "cu"s (and usually "kei"s too) are replaced with tenses, and your "ku"s are replaced with pro-sumti (and other such  sneaky arrangements). 

mu'o mi'e se ckiku