On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
Okay, "du'u", like all abstractors (nu, ku, ni and the less often encountered ones such as su'u, si'o and pu'u) takes a bridi and wraps it all up into one little package that acts as a selbri. In particular, that means you can take a whole sentence like "mi klama le zarci le zdani" (I went to the store from home), stick an abstractor in front of it (in this case du'u), and treat this as a single unit, meaning something akin to "a fact of me going to the store from home". Stick a lo/le in front of that and it becomes a sumti meaning this. This sumti is used in slots that (in general) require talking about abstract ideas or thoughts. For example "mi jinvi lo du'u mi klama le zarci le zdani" -- "I thought I went to the store". If you want anything to follow this package, you usually need to end it with the terminator "kei", otherwise the following stuff will be unintentionally wrapped up within the abstraction -- mi jinvi lo du'u mi klama le zarci le zdani kei lo prulamdei ("I thought I went to the store in regards to yesterday"). See chapter 11 of the reference grammar for more information.
Hope this helps
--gejyspaOn Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Luke Bergen
<lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm finding this a lot and the definition "abstractor: predication/bridi abstractor; x1 is predication [bridi] expressed in sentence x2 at 0 (cf. mintu, dunli)" is not very helpful to me. Could someone give me an example of "du'u" in a real world sentence and explain how it affects the sentence. I've found sentences with du'u in it that have english versions of that sentence but I can't figure out what the "du'u" is actually doing!
- Luke Bergen