Re: [lojban-beginners] Question about lo, ku and cu

[Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>]

{lo merko ku vecnu ti mi} and {lo merko cu vecnu ti mi} do mean the same thing. Technically, although neither the Wave Lessons, nor Lojban for Beginners says so, the full version is actually {lo merko ku cu vecnu ti mi}. This closes the {lo} and then flags that the selbri is coming up. The reason we don't have to say this is, as the Wave Lessons do a good job of expressing later on, is that the terminators can be omitted when there is only one valid parse  Once you've closed the {lo} with {ku} in the {ku} version, there's no way for {vecnu} to bind to {merko} to make a tanru; on the other hand, once you've said that the main selbri is coming up with {cu} in the {cu} version, what follows has to be that, it can't be attached to {merko} to make a tanru otherwise it wouldn't be the main selbri. So in either case the other one drops.

Overall I find {ku} to be simpler to understand, especially for beginners, partly because it is essentially uniform: there's nothing special about sumti in the front and sumti in the back when you use {ku}. {cu} becomes more essential when you get into nesting, where you can elide quite a few terminators at once by using it.

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Nasya L'Bert <njkanja@gmail.com> wrote:

coi ro do,  I have been wondering about the difference between using lo and ko and using cu.  For example, if I want to say "an American sells this to me" do the sentences "lo merko ku vecnu ti mi" and "lo merko cu vecnu ti mi" mean the same thing?

 

I know that cu means that a selbri is coming up and separates that from the sumti (that could turn into tanru without cu separating it) And that lo turns a selbri into a sumti and ko finishes the conversion.  .uanai I'm learning from wave lessons now instead of Lojban for beginners and they seem to be showing me different ways to say sentences lol.

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