[lojban-beginners] Re: the ".i" after "lu"

["Karl Naylor" <karl.org@gmail.com>]

On 18/05/07, Vid Sintef <picos.picos@gmail.com> wrote:

> Along the course "Lojban For Beginners" I saw sentences with the direct
> quotation word being followed by the sentence terminator ".i", like this:
> la ranjit cu cusku lu .i mi djica lo bakni cidjrkari .e lo sluni nanba li'u
> On the other hand, there are also sentences without ".i" after "lu":
> la ranjit. pu cusku lu la djiotis. pu rinsa mi li'u
> What is the difference between them?

Beginner myself, but perfectly confident about my answer here.  Put
simply, "lu .i (...) li'u" means that Ranjeet really did say ".i", and
conversely.

If you mean to ask why he sometimes says ".i" and sometimes not, I'd
imagine he uses a sentence separator when someone (himself or
otherwise) has just spoken, to be clear he's starting a new sentence
and not appending to the last one.  However, I'm at work just now and
don't have time to check.  It may also just depend on Ranjeet's mood,
or the authors may just have forgotten to put it in :)  Does that make
sense?