[ li'o ]
Indeed. It's a suggestion: have a word that facilitates what you'd
like. {loicu} seems a bit long. Since {lu'o} seems redundant, perhaps
its meaning could be altered?
As far as I know, loi and lei are a contraction of lu'olo and lu'olo respectively. I'm basing this on http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/ lojbanbrochure/lessons/less4articles.html which reads
> lu'o le and lu'o lo are very useful concepts, even without explicit numbers, and there are shorter ways of saying each
> when no number comes between them: lei and loi respectively.Is this still true? I'm not quite up to speed on the xorlo changes per the byfy yet.
[ li'o ]
Yes, {loi X} would mean {lo gunma lo X}. It's on the sumti because
that's where it should be. In English, it's "on the verb" because we
want to refer to X as a noun phrase, even though it's not the
'highest' noun phrase, because this is convenient in so many cases:
{lo gunma lo X} can't replace {loi X} because the former is two sumti and the latter is only one. {lo gunma be lo X} would work, but I don's see why you would use this method when there is a basic grammar word that does the same thing. It's similar to saying in English {I past-tense eat} instead of just {I ate}. The only case I would see this in is if you specifically want to say that it is a group, made up of members, instead of just members who are abstractly grouped.
While the baseline *has* been unfrozen, it would really be helpful for beginners (myself included) if we didn't take the whole language apart again and redefine everything. So, it is probably better spent time to understand exactly how things work now then to speculate on how they aught to work.
mu'omi'e .aleks.