[lojban-beginners] Re: Feedback on phrases

[Andrew Archibald <archibal@math.mcgill.ca>]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 11:31:14PM +0100, GREGORY DYKE wrote:

> > > > vi ma le mi palku
> > > > 	Where are my pants?
> > > 
> > > That's grammatical, but somewhat incomplete because 
> > > it has no selbri. A more complete sentence might be: 
> > > {le mi palku ma zvati}
> > 
> > Why do you need another selbri?  It seems like this says "my pants"
> > (observative) "near where?" (tense).  
> 
> A lojban sentence or "bridi" expresses a relationship. The relationship is that expressed by the selbri. This is a relationship between arguments or "sumti".
> 
> your first sentence has no selbri, only a sumti. (if this makes no sense to you, it's cos I'm no good at explaining).

Hmm.  I assumed that {palku} was the selbri here, but I see it
shouldn't be the main selbri of the sentence.  Do observatives such as
{lenku} (or, being in Montreal, {.oisai lenku}) have selbri, as such?

> The main relationship that you are trying to express here is that of your pants being somewhere. This gives the selbri "zvati". You then give it two sumti: "my pants" and "fill_in_the_blank" (to be precise, "le mi palku" is "the things associated with me that am going to identfy as being pants made out of some cloth).

This makes a lot of sense (and in fact, the reason I didn't use it was
because I couldn't find {zvati} with the dictionary tools I had
handy).  It seems like the "nearness" should be given first-class
status rather than be relegated to the tense system.

> > Is there a reason to prefer {le mi palku ma zvati} over {le mi 
> > palku zvati ma}?
> 
> yes and no: the second suggestion does not have a selbri: palku and zvati merge together to form a tanru: 
> sumti: my pant-type-of-thing-at-somewhere
> sumti: fill in the blank
> selbri: ????????
> 
> you need to terminate the sumti by either inserting a "cu" ("terminate all: selbri follows") or a "ku" (terminate sumti) like so:
> 
> le mi palku cu zvati ma (preferred)
> le mi palku ku zvati ma

Oops.  Still haven't got the hang of elidable terminators.  I wish CLL
introduced the terminator at the same time as the opening word...  But
is the only advantage the missing terminator, or does the swapped
place structure still draw attention to the {ma}?

> yes, that is the somewhat clumsy limitation we have: either you claim a particular one, but in that case, you can't assert that it actually is, or you say "any" while saying what it really is.

I can see the justification for it ({le} and {lo} should never
implicitly make an assertion) but it does seem awkward.

ki'e do

Andrew