[lojban-beginners] Re: Feedback on phrases

["Adam D. Lopresto" <adam@pubcrawler.org>]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Andrew Archibald wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 10:22:00AM +0100, GREGORY DYKE wrote:
>
> > le mi palku cu barda (my pants are big)
> .ija le mi solri blaci cu manku
> .i ko se zgike .o'u.u'e
>
> > barda is the selbri
> > le mi palku is a sumti
>
> Ah.  Maybe it would be clearer to say that every sentence needs a
> selbri at the top level?

If you really want to get away without the other selbri, you can make palku the
main selbri, but you have to drop the le, and so fiddle it around a little

vi ma palku sera'a mi

vi ma zo'e pe mi palku

or something like that.  (I think "vi ma pi'o mi palku" would be sort of nice).

> > > I can see the justification for it ({le} and {lo} should never
> > > implicitly make an assertion) but it does seem awkward.
> >
> > no! lo does make an assertion:
> >
> > lo kanba cu citka =
> > da poi kanba zo'u da citka
> >
> > there exists a goat such that this goat eats.
>
> Well, all {lo} asserts is ``there exists a goat''.  Not that this is
> trivial: {lo vofli xarju cu ma} is a question making a rather dubious
> statement.  Can it be answered with Hofstadter's "unask that
> question!"?  Is {na} sufficient?

"na'i" does just that.
-- 
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

.a'o le ko selmri go selxru gi festrspama -- May only your spam bounce