[lojban-beginners] Re: "la" questions

["Betsemes" <betsemes@gmail.com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alex Joseph Martini" <alexjm@umich.edu>
To: <lojban-beginners@lojban.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 3:33 PM
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: "la" questions


> >> [ cut ]
> >> was done.
> >
> > Nobody has tried to refute you, so I guess you are right. And if I may
> > say so, some of those grammatical constructs are ugly compared to the
> > alternative ungrammatical ones. I would have preferred to have to
> > write/say "la djan cu klama".
> >
> > Hmm, >>mi xorxes<<, "mi betsemes". This sounds like using cmene as
> > brivla; something like "x1 is called/has the name <cmene>".
> >
> > [ more cut ]
> >
> > This way of using cmene would make "mi'e" unnecessary.
> >
> > I think I like this other way much better than the chosen one. And it
> > was just to save a single "cu"......
> >
>
> The way I tend to think of the division is that cmene are a sort of
> 'special word'. Sort of like something that's not truly a word in Lojban
> but is quoted into the stream of speech. This probably comes to me from
> the idea of using quotes or other special marks around strings in most
> programming languages, as I learned several of these before learning
> Lojban.
>
> Perhaps this is more where the original line of thought was, rather than
> the idea of 'saving a cu'? I haven't studied far enough to run into the
> limitations that were described earlier in the discussion, but I can
> see how allowing cmevla to be used more freely would have simplified the
> grammar of quite a few types of things.

Ok, I have to clarify something before xorxes complain about me stating
things that he never said. He never said that that was the original
intention, he just said it was the benefit of having it that way.