[lojban] Re: "la" rule

[Seth Gordon <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Bob LeChevalier wrote:
>> 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.

Ah.  It seemed like a "beginner" feature to me because as far as I could
glean, one could replace "le" or "lo" with "la" in a phrase, and the
phrase would still parse--it would be like substituting "Spider-Man" for
"the arachnoid human".  But I suppose once "doi" and "mi'e" are thrown
into the mix then one has to be more careful.


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