[lojban-beginners] Re: lu preti li'u

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

On Tuesday 23 June 2009 11:13:05 Luke Bergen wrote:
> So, I have a couple of questions about lu ... li'u that I haven't found in
> the CLL yet.
>
> A: lo gerku goi ko'a cu barda
> B: .i la saimon cusku lu ko'a cu xunre li'u
>
> Now, does the {ko'a} in the quote that B is referring to refer to "lo
> gerku" or potentially something else entirely?  Or does the presence of a
> {ko'a} without a {goi} assignment within that quote make the entire quote
> ungrammatical.

"ko'a" in the second sentence refers to something in Simon's utterance, three 
words of which are quoted here. Unless you're playing Simon Says, in which 
case the second sentence is ignored because it contains "ko'a" instead 
of "ko". The presence of "ko'a" without "goi" is not ungrammatical; it is 
merely semantically unclear. The song "le cmalu bloti" uses it; it is up to 
the listener to figure out that ko'a is the crew as a whole, or the crew 
minus the boy, and ko'e is the boy.

If B had said "la saimon. cusku le sedu'u ko'a xunre", though, "ko'a" would 
refer to lo gerku.

> Furthermore, if we have:
>
> A: la saimon cusku lu mi barda li'u
>
> is "mi" saimon or the speaker "A"?

"mi" refers to "la saimon".

Pierre