[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban qua lingua franca

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

On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 10:44:56AM -0800, Jorge Llamb�as wrote:

> --- Andrew Archibald <archibal@math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> > What I find difficult is grasping the grouping operators.  I very
> > often find myself wanting simple general-purpose parentheses.  For
> > example, to produce something like "the yogic flyer" you have to use
> > {be}: {le volfli be le makfioga be'o}.  At least, I think so; I can't
> > find any such usage in the CLL but I can't find any other way to do
> > this and people have claimed it's right.  
> 
> {le makfioga vofli} would be the most direct translation, assuming
> {makfioga} is the right word for what you want. (Is yoga magic?)

Well, it seems that yogic flyers fly using the power of yoga; they're
not merely vaguely associated with yoga.  As for the {makf} rafsi,
it covers magic and the supernatural; I'd say that to the extent
that yoga allows them to fly, it's supernatural.  

Fortunately we haven't replaced our air force with them yet (although
the Natural Law party did get a few votes...)

> (BTW, {volfli} is a lujvo from {vofli fliba}, so almost the
> opposite of {vofli}.)

er, oops.

> Yes, there are about 120 selma'o, way too many. Fortunately a good 
> number of them are never or hardly ever used, so you don't actually 
> need to learn them all to have a good command of the language.

Really, that's just a terrible arrangement.  Grammatical structures
that are not only unusual but rare are going to get mangled in no
time...

Anyway, I think for my own use I should make up a cheat sheet of the
grammar that I'd actually want to use; I find the tutorials really
awkward to work with, so I've fallen back to the CLL.  It doesn't seem
that well organized, though, too cumbersome to read as a textbook and
not organized enough for a language reference.

Of course, it makes sense to make available anything I write, but
really, it's writing such a thing rather than reading one that's
useful.

Andrew