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Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: gismu as sumti





On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 8:44 AM, la nub <lagelace@gmail.com> wrote:
And just in case you were wondering, I am a programmer.

Two more questions though, what do kei and ku mean?
[...]
these two words seem to have no meaning at all.

They are called "terminators" and can be some times (rather often) elided.
You can think of kei and ku as closing brackets in C or as the VB "End While", "End If", "Next", ...
Since lojban grammar is formal as those of programming languages, you need explicit keywords to signal the termination of a statement and avoid ambiguities, but since the Lojban is a human language, to make it less clumsy, you can drop a terminator whenever their presence can be inferred.  For example if a nested part ends where the main part ends, only the nested terminater can be surely dropped.  This is a feature that the old SGML had (if you are familiar with it).

Consider the grammar:

A -> C D
C -> letter | letter C |  "@" | ""
D -> digit D | letter D | "#" | ""

You may parse "xyt" in many different ways (i.e. "xyt" is an ambigous statement) while "x@yt" and "xyt@" are not. So "@" is the terminator of C (as "kei" is a terminator for "nu"). If you get "xy4" there is no ambiguity so you don't need to waste an extra character to write "xy@4".

mu'e mi'e remod.

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