[lojban] Re: Help in examples ...

[lojban-out@lojban.org]

> > > Please can someone provide me with a few examples
> > > where a sumti cannot be passed of as "just a complex
> > > sort of noun"?
> >
> > There's no such thing ... If we
> > called the sumti "noun phrases", the gismu "simple
> > verbs" and so on, we could speak about lojban grammar
> > in English just fine.
>
> I think that turns out not to be entirely the case. {blanu}, for
> example, is not well described as a "verb" because it subsumes the
> verb "to be".  The selbri, and brivla in particular, have almost
> swayed her because of the unification offered by predicates. Counter
> examples to sumti=noun might get most of the way there.

The biggest difference I see between selbri and verbs is the number of
arguments.  Some verbs have direct objects, some also have indirect objects,
but although it's easy to picture a verb that means "to be blue" it's hard for
me to picture a verb with five places (like klama).  selbri represent a
relationship among entities, not an action on the part of a single entity.
Perhaps good example brivla that are hard to treat as verbs would be ones that
are more inherently nouns:

 santa              umbrella
                    x1 is an umbrella/parasol shielding x2 from x3,
                    made of material x4, supported by x5

For instance.

As for sumti that aren't nouns, I'm not sure there are any, but there are some
that don't feel very nounish in normal English.  Consider "I want to go home".

.i mi djica le nu mi klama le zdani

"to go home" doesn't seem like a noun to me (though technically I guess "the
event of my going home" would be), but {le nu mi klama le zdani} definitely is
a sumti in that bridi.

Really, the differences between nouns and sumti and between verbs and selbri
aren't that great, if you look at it from a certain point of view.  Perhaps the
best reason to use the terminology is if it helps you overlook your existing
ideas of what nouns and verbs are supposed to be/do.
--
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
    --Gandalf