On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 8:12 PM, David Imel <david.a.imel@gmail.com> wrote:All,I've been really enjoying studying your responses -- thanks to all of you: to Stela for the nice { fi'i }, to Pierre and Jonathan for pointing me to the current online CLL -- very helpful! -- and to those and Jorge for the sipna(x1) discussion.I admit to still being a bit confused, though reading through all your answers and looking up words I don't know is good practice!Specifically,a) Stela wrote that you can add sumti beyond the specified number for a gismu, but in the following conversation it seemed to be the case that you always needed a cmavo such as { fi'o }. Do you? Or is that "elidable"?
{fi'o} allows one to add an extra sumti place that doesn't normally exist for a word. The extra place is the x1 of whatever selbri comes after the {fi'o}, such as {se nenri}. (The x1 of {se nenri} is the x2 of {nenri}.) As an example The word {cusku} (x1 says x2 for audience x3 via medium x4) doesn't have a place for language. We can use {fi'o} to add that with {bangu} (x1 is a language used by x2 to communicate x3), so {mi ca cusku fi'o bangu la.lojban.} means "I am not expressing in the language Lojban."
It is allowable to fill in unspecified places of a word, as in the example you pointed out, but I don't think I've ever seen that done except by mistake. As Stela pointed out, any sumti in an undefined place has an undefined relationship with the selbri.
b) Jonathan and Jorge (sorry for using English, eventually I'll be able to do this in Lojban I hope!) discussed the relative merits of { fi'o se nenri } and { ne'i }. For the life of me, I cannot find { ne'i } defined anywhere. The closest thing I could find was here: http://dag.github.com/cll/9/17/ where the CV'V cmavo seem to be contractions of gismu. Is this one of those for { nenri }? And if so, does the argument of { ne'i } refer to the x1 or x2? Jonathan wrote "{ ne'i } = { fi'o se nenri }" -- is that "definitional" or just a paraphrase?
{ne'i} is one of the many BAI cmavo. The BAI cmavo are all cmavo that are basically {fi'o} shortcuts, so instead of {fi'o se nenri}, one can say merely {ne'i}, because it has the same meaning. Similarly, {bangu} has a BAI, {bau}, so in my example above I could have said {mi ca cusku bau la.lojban.}, which means the same thing. The most useful gismu have a BAI cmavo for them, and they operate, in most cases, the same way as {fi'o <gismu>} would, including using {se}, {te}, {ve}, and {xe} (the SE cmavo) to get to the x2, x3, x4, and x5 places.
If you're interested, there is a list of all of these BAI cmavo at http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=BPFK+Section%3A+sumtcita+Formants&no_bl=y#Some_selbri_with_a_short_fi_o-form:, which also shows which gismu it is based on, and what it means with the various SE as well.
Thanks again -- I'm really enjoying both the language and this list.--David. { la deivyd. }
I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that we are happy to help in any way you need, and we are all more than happy that you're here.
--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.a'o.e'e ko cmima le bende pe lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )