Re: [lojban-beginners] How to say "the x which/who/that does y, does z"

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 7:41 PM,  <three65daysaweek@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi, everyone. Or, should I say, coi rodo.

fi'i do (Welcome!)

> How do you say "the x which/who/that does y, does z"?

Half of Lojban's grammar is ways to do this.  A bridi is a very simple
thing.  A bridi has in it just one relationship (the selbri) and just
one list of arguments (the terbri).  It just talks about those
arguments being in that relationship.  To say anything complicated,
anything that relates various arguments to each other in various ways,
you have to combine more than one bridi, tying them all together into
a bundle that makes numerous related assertions.

> "The woman who owns a car is my mother."

OK so here's an ordinary sentence that seems simple enough.  But
really it expresses quite a lot.  There's not just one relationship
described here.  We have the relationship of owning a car, the
relationship of *being* a car, the relationship between you and your
mother, and the relationship of being a woman (the relationship
between some person and her gender).  But even then we just have a
pile of unconnected descriptions.  In addition to expressing all of
those relationships, we also want to express a connection between
them-- namely, that the owner, your mother, and the person who's a
woman are all the same person, and that the thing that's owned is the
same thing as the car.

If we couldn't tie bridi together into a bundle, we'd have a lot of
bridi to say:

{.i karce .i ponse lo go'i .i ninmu .i mamta mi .i lo go'i lo go'e lo
go'i xi ci cu du}

"There's a car.  Someone possesses that car.  Someone is a woman.
Someone is my mother.  The last thing, and the second to last thing,
and the third to last thing are all the same thing."

So we'd rather wrap them all up together instead.  But now we have
some choices to make.  Like I said, half of Lojban's grammar is
various ways of doing this.  And it's not entirely arbitrary which way
we tie things together, either.  While we're tying together all these
different objects and their various relationships, we're also adding
another layer of expression on top.  Next we show the relationship (of
the relationships between the relationships) to the conversation
itself, to me and the people I'm talking to and what we're talking
about.

For instance, there's a slight emphasis on the first sumti in a
sentence.  It was brought up first (and Lojban's flexible enough that
we could have mentioned things in any order if we really wanted to) so
that implies that it's the first thing we should be thinking about and
relating everything else in the sentence to.  It's a bit like the
difference between saying "speaking of my mother, she owns that car"
and saying "speaking of that car, it's owned by my mother"-- but not
even that strong, just a bit of a suggestion that the first thing is
especially notable in this context.

So we have to choose between, for example:

{le ninmu noi ponse lo karce cu mamta mi}
"The woman has a car and is my mother."

{le ponse be lo karce be'o noi ninmu cu mamta mi}
"The owner of a car is a woman and is my mother."

{le mamta be mi be'o noi ninmu cu ponse lo karce}
"My mom, who's a woman, owns a car."

{lo karce cu se ponse le ninmu noi mamta mi}
"A car is owned by a woman, who's my mom."

Another example of emphasis is that just one of the relationships
described can have the privileged position of being the main
relationship of the top-level bridi in the sentence, the main selbri.
There are lots of different relationships embedded in a complex bridi,
inside all kinds of descriptions and clauses, and we have to single
one of them out for that central position.  So obviously there's an
implication that that's an especially important relationship in the
context of the sentence.

Putting {ninmu} as the main selbri:
{le mamta be mi be'o noi ponse lo karce cu ninmu}
"My mother, who owns a car, is a woman."

Putting {ponse} as the main selbri:
{le mamta be mi be'o noi ninmu cu ponse lo karce}
"My mother, who's a woman, owns a car."

Putting {mamta} as the main selbri:
{le ninmu noi ponse lo karce cu mamta mi}
"The woman, who owns a car, is my mother."

Putting {karce} as the main selbri:
{lo se ponse be le ninmu noi mamta mi cu karce}
"Something owned by the woman, who's my mother, is a car."

There's plenty of other ways of tying bridi together, like logical
connection.  There's all kinds of magical things you can do with
logical connection, but you can also just use AND, in which case it
just connects two related bridi (in lots of useful shapes) and asserts
both of them.  Or you can connect bridi together more vaguely, with
things like seltanru or BAI.  Don't feel like you have to learn them
all at once.  You'll have a couple you use at first and then as you
learn more of them your Lojban will get smoother and there will be
more things it's easy for you to say.

mu'o mi'e la stela selckiku

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lojban Beginners" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban-beginners@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban-beginners+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban-beginners?hl=en.