Re: [lojban-beginners] newbie question on bridi construction

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Friday 15 October 2010 22:12:07 David Imel 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" is a particle for making phrasal prepositions (which are phrases 
like "by means of" that are used like prepositions). "fi'o se claxu", for 
instance, is exactly equivalent to "se cau". You can add a place by using a 
proper preposition (i.e. one in the selma'o BAI) or a tense marker (in any of 
various selma'o, but unlike BAI they cannot be converted by SE).

Only terminators are elidable in Lojban. (Terminators AFAIK occur only in 
Loglanic languages.) The terminator for "fi'o" is "fe'u".

> 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 a tense marker, so it's a paraphrase. "tai = fi'o tamsmi" is 
definitional. You can say "mi mo'ine'i klama" (I go into) as well as "mi ne'i 
klama" (I go in, i.e. I go from one place to another while remaining in). You 
can't say "mi mo'icau sisku" (but not all tense markers can take "mo'i" 
either). You can say "secau" but not "sene'i".

You can look up words at vlasisku.lojban.org and jbovlaste.lojban.org.

Pierre
-- 
The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain.

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