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[lojban-beginners] Re: Possesives in lojban



Dmitry wrote:
Hi, everybody, nice to talk with you. A week ago I began to learn Lojban again, after a two years pause (-;
So, I have simple question.

There is an exercise on possessives, convert "pe" to nested form
 le cukta pe le ninmu -->

I offered:
 le le ninmu cu cukta

Is it wrong? Answers page says "You can't do this (for now): le le ninmu cukta is ambiguous.". But how about "cu"?


That would make "le ninmu" the first place of "cukta", so "le ninmu cu cukta" would mean "the woman is a book", and putting another "le" in front of that would be ungrammatical, or at least very strange. You can say something like "le nu le ninmu cu cukta", but this would mean something like "the event of the woman being a book", which again is not what you want.

If you aren't too concerned with precision, you can just say "le ninmu cukta", but that does not specify that it's any particular woman's book - it could be a book written by a woman, a book written for women, a book about women, or anything else you can think of involving "ninmu" modifying "cukta".

robin.tr