Re: [lojban-beginners] sei vs to

["Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

tijlan wrote:
> {sei} and {to}... When should we use which? What is the difference 
> between a discursive element and a parenthetical element?

"to" is a normal parenthetical, and can be used pretty much anywhere for 
any purpose that you would use a parenthetical in English or another 
language.  You can talk about anything in a to parenthetical.

sei is specifically for metalinguistic discourse about the sentence or 
text.  So in addition to any grammatical hooks that it provides, it has 
a semantic implication that to does not have.  It was specifically added 
to the language because of certain textual features in complex English 
text that didn't have a clearly corresponding structure in Lojban, but 
was later expanded to allow for on-the-fly creation of novel discursives 
and attitudinals (members of UI), in the same way that fi'o is used to 
allow on-the-fly creation of novel sumti tcita/modal tags (members of 
BAI), from a corresponding bridi.

The original usages of sei were
a)embedded in quoted text, the identification of the speaker, and any 
supplemental information included therewith ("Think Tom Swiftie 
adverbs", lojbab said self-referentially, "and look at this quote for 
such an English example".
(You will find the original use of sei for this purpose in Athelstan''s 
1990 translation of Saki's "The Open Window", somewhere in the Lojban 
texts page, which IIRC has lots of conversation as the various speakers 
walk down the hall, open windows, look out through them, all expressed 
in comma delimited phrases embedded within the quotes in the English 
original.)
b) The translation of self-referential paradoxes, of the "This sentence 
is false" variety, non-paradoxically by jumping to a new metalinguistics 
level inside the sei construct.
dei jetnu sei jitfa

The times when you need a se'u more or less correspond to the times when 
you need a fe'u on the end of a fi'o - generally if you've opened a 
complex multilevel structure inside the construct that you wish to make 
sure is terminated so it doesn't suck up something accidentally from the 
main bridi level.  This most commonly occurs when there are abstraction 
sumti in the construct.  You can probably end these with kei, but to be 
sure, use se'u/fe'u.

lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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