Additionally, I just thought of a need for se'u... example: lu ko'a plise sei mi pensi se'u citka. Amirite?
On May 11, 2010 10:25 PM, "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:--tijlan wrote:
"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.
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> {sei} and {to}... When should we use which? What is the difference between a discu...
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
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Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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