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Re: [lojban] Re: "la" rule



Seth Gordon wrote:
Bob LeChevalier wrote:

ONLY if a word is in cmene form is it illegal to have a "la".  Using a
gismu or lujvo or a fu'ivla as a name  ("la latmo" for "Latin") has no
restriction.

Indeed, I would imagine that native Lojbanists would indeed use brivla
to name things, rather than Lojbanize foreign words.  That is indeed how
several languages work.


The tutorial and reference material on Lojban that I've seen don't say a
lot about this option.  E.g., _lojban. bei loi co'a cilre_ suggests that
since "Mei Li" is Chinese for "beautiful", then someone named Mei Li
could Lojbanize her name as "la melb."  But why not "la melbi"?

Perhaps the authors of all these works just assumed that they didn't
need to spell out this aspect of the grammar because it was so obvious,
but it wasn't obvious to me....

It wasn't considered a "beginner" feature for English language speakers learning the language, and all the teaching materials devised so far have been written by at-best-intermediate speakers for the benefit of beginners.

The potential grammar of vocatives (things that can follow "doi" or "mi'e") is non-trivial. Likewise, sumti grammar can get quite complicated, since we designed things to be generically compatible with every feature of every language that we could fit in, so as not to unnecessarily metaphysically biased in the grammar.

Even CLL, which tries to explain a lot of non-beginner features of the language was limited by the capabilities of John, myself, and a few others to come up with examples and usages wherein these features were used.

How much of the possibilities will ever see actual usage, we can only guess; we can't easily teach what we barely understood how to define, and not how and when to use ourselves.

lojbab