[lojban-beginners] Re: POM: the Princess puts her foot down

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 1/23/07, Cortesi <dcortesi@mindspring.com> wrote:
> piro La Barsum se ckape .ije. La Eliym ba terskicu
>
> I would like to say Helium MUST be told -- but I don't see how to tersely
> say that. The line is already too long for emphatic speech or for the
> actor's comfort.

I use {jungau}, "x1 makes x2 know x3", for "tell".

But in this case, since you are not really saying who it is that must
tell Helium, you could just say: {.ei la .eliym djuno}, "Helium ought to know".

> I'm still confused about the syntactic roles of selma'o PU. It appears from
> some examples in the ref.gram. that [bridi] ca [abstraction] is how to say
> this-while-that, so "fly straight while we can"  is just {sirji vofli ca
> [lo?] li'i ma'a kakne}. True?

More or less, yes.

A simple bridi consists of a selbri and any number of terms:

 [term] [term] ... [selbri] [term] [term] ...

A term can be a simple sumti, like {mi}, {ko'a}, {le mlatu}, {la djan},
{lo nu mi klama le zarci}, etc. or a _tagged_ sumti, like
{fa mi}, {ki'u ko'a}, {ca lo nu mi klama le zarci}, etc.

There are many types of tags, the members of PU are among them.

Now, for "while" I would use {ca'o} rather than {ca}.

{ca} is better for "when". It indicates that the time of the main selbri event
is the same as the time of the tagged sumti. It is not concerned with duration.

{ca'o} is better for "while". It indicates that the main selbri event happens
for as long as the tagged sumti (and perhaps longer).

{ze'a} is better for "for". It indicates the complete duration of the main
selbri event.

{co'i} is better for (the time sense of) "in". It indicates that the main selbri
event happens within the time of the tagged sumti (i.e. the converse
of {ca'o}).

> Also confused about NU such as li'i -- when is it needful to have a LE
> before a NU?

NU converts a full bridi into a selbri. LE converts a selbri into a sumti.
When you need to convert a full bridi into a sumti, you use NU to convert
the bridi into a selbri and then LE to convert it into a sumti.

mu'o mi'e xorxes