Ah! ok. Thank you Luke, let me try again:
The technical reason is that CU separates the preceding sumti from
the selbri that follows, and a nested LE is part of the sumti.
If a cu were permitted in the case described, I believe this would
be valid:
le le broda cu brode cu brodi
And would be identical to:
le le broda ku brode cu brodi
I suspect this is not permitted for the following reasons, though
I'm speculating:
* CU is designed as an aide to the listener in finding the selbri,
so permitting it in a nested LE opens the possibility of having
multipe CU in a bridi, weakening the ability to find the selbri.
* KU is the terminator to use when terminating a nested LE. While
you could *also* unambigiously permit other terminators, this
isn't the only scenario where this is true. If you permitted
every terminator that wasn't unambiguous you'd still have a
parseable grammar, but one which would be more difficult to
understand: there would be increased cognitive load in determining
what is being terminated, as you no longer have a direct
correspondence between the opening and closing selma'o.
-Alan
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:15:34AM -0400, Luke Bergen wrote:
> I think the question though is, if {cu} means "separate selbri from
> preceding sumti" then, why can't you do {le le ninmu cu klama} where this
> is interpreted as: (something that goes in x1 of: ( something that goes in
> x1 of: (ninmu <cu so break out of this sumti and start talking about a
> selbri>) comes).
> Ok, I don't know how to describe that better. Basically, if {cu} says "ok,
> we're done with this sumti, now do a selbri" but that itself is happening
> inside a LE, then why can't the following selbri be converted by the outer
> LE?
>
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:06 AM, .alyn.post.
> <[1]alyn.post@lodockikumazvati.org> wrote:> [2]lojban-beginners@googlegroups.com.
>
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 07:49:21AM -0700, Ben Foppa wrote:
> > Lojban for Beginners says "...consider how you would say le tamne pe
> > le ninmu klama 'the woman traveller's cousin' with this kind of
> > nesting. You could flip it around as le le ninmu klama tamne � but
> > then, how can you tell where the 'possessor' ends and where the
> > 'possessee' begins?"
> >
> > I wonder why a construct like "le le ninmu klama cu tamne" wouldn't
> > work, to separate the argument to the first "le" (which is "ninmu
> > klama"), from the argument to the second "le" (which is "tamne"). Is
> > the purpose of "cu" not simply to separate two selbri when they are
> > consecutive arguments, or when one is the argument to another?
> >
>
> You can use {ku} to terminate the inner {le}:
>
> le le ninmu klama ku tamne
>
> -alyn
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