[lojban] Re: lojban ills: implicit emphasis

[Jorge Llambías <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 02:49:53 -0800, xah lee <xah@xahlee.org> wrote:
>  As a manner of speaking, we may ask, why didn't lojban
> provide some mechanism to indicate emphasis, instead of using the
> rather implicit and undefined emphasis attached to ordering?

The emphasis attached to ordering is not really very well
defined. We assume that a more marked ordering might 
indicate something, but there aren't any rules really.

To unequivocally indicate emphasis, there is the cmavo
{ba'e}, which emphasizes the following word. In addition
to emphasis, you can make an argument the topic of
a sentence by placing it in the prenex, and you can put
focus on a part of the sentence by marking it with an
attitudinal.

mu'o mi'e xorxes