[lojban] Re: Help in examples ...

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

--- Pierre Abbat wrote:
> A sumti is an argument of a predicate, according to the gimste. 

That's true, but in English the word "sumti", borrowed from Lojban,
is used to describe anything that *can* be used as an argument, not
just things in *actual use* as arguments. In English we will often 
say that {mi}, {lo cukta}, {lo ka ke'a bajra}, {li mu} and 
{zoi zoi moo zoi} are all sumti, whether or not they have ever been
the arguments of any predicate. So if we translated from English
"a sumti" back into Lojban it should probably be {lo ka'e sumti}.

>A phrase which 
> has the same internal grammar as a sumti but is the object of {pe} (which is 
> not a preposition or a case marker) is not a sumti, because the pe-phrase 
> modifies a sumti, not a selbri. 

At least overtly, the phrase is not being a sumti. (But {<sumti1> pe
<sumti2>} is short for {<sumti1> poi ke'a srana <sumti2>}, so we could
say that the phrase is being sumti to the predicate {srana} implicit
in {pe}.) 

However in {zo mi}, the word {mi} is not being a sumti, it is just being
a word.
 
> Sumti are much more often made from verbs than nouns, so it sounds 
> a bit funny to call them noun phrases.

There are no nouns in Lojban (unless pronouns count as nouns), there are
only noun phrases.

mu'o mi'e xorxes



		
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