[lojban-beginners] Re: Dictionary output

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Monday 22 June 2009 18:36:12 Jorge Llambías wrote:
> On 6/22/09, Johan Pretorius <pretoriusjf@gmail.com> wrote:
> > How is it decided which sumti goes in which position?  Is this something
> > that is consciously (arbitrarily) chosen when the lujvo is taken into the
> > dictionary, or are there rules governing it?
>
> There are some guidelines, but not really strict rules.

Usually the place structure of a lujvo is formed by taking the place structure 
of the last gismu, inserting or appending the place structures of previous 
gismu, and deleting any places that are redundant or obvious. A lujvo with 
such a place structure is called a jvajvo.

There are some lujvo which, for semantic reasons, don't follow the rules. For 
instance, both "lurdei" and "pavdei" mean "Monday". (The planet/element names 
are taken from East Asia; the numeric names start with Sunday as 0, not 1, 
but Sunday is also zeldei.) The place structure is not "x1 is x2 Mondays long 
by standard x3", but "x1 is Monday of week x2 on calendar x3".

> By construction, there is only one way that a lujvo can be split into
> rafsi. You can always know which rafsi a lujvo consists of, even if
> you don't recognize any of the rafsi. All you need to know is that
> rafsi are of one of these forms: CCV, CVC(y), CVV(r), CCVCy, CVCCy,
> CCVCV, CVCCV. The last two can only appear at the end of the lujvo,
> and the last rafsi of the lujvo must end in a V.

You also have to know which consonant pairs can appear at the beginning of a 
brivla. No rafsi can begin with a consonant pair that isn't an initial 
consonant pair. So "bongnanba" cannot be analyzed as "bon-gna-nba" because 
neither "gn" nor "nb" is a valid initial pair. "bongnanba" is a word of 
fu'ivla form that appears in the Book with no clue what it 
means. "bongynanba" and "bognanba", which are two forms of the same word, 
mean "bone bread", whatever that is.

On Monday 22 June 2009 19:23:24 tijlan wrote:
> I think I've seen "zoi net ... net" and "zoi iutub ... iutub" on IRC.

Also common is "zoi url http://dza.dai.com/rodbo%27e.html url".

Pierre