Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Not needing terminators

[Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>]

I see now, thank you. Written that way I can read jbofi'e's output much more easily than in the format I saw it before. {se nandu} really does turn out rather cumbersome when you have to write it out like that, doesn't it? 

Also, {lojbo tavla}, that's a nice way to do that.

mu'omi'e latros.

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 08:21:23PM -0500, Ian Johnson wrote:
>    I'm trying to work out when you need and don't need terminators. For
>    example, here's a sentence I wrote today:
>
>    xu do se nandu lonu do tavla mi fo la lojban. lonu do tatpi
>
>    In idiomatic English, what I'm intending here is: "Do you find it
>    difficult to talk with me in Lojban when you are tired?"
>
>    I put this sentence into jbofi'e and it appears to have parsed it the way
>    I intended.

Then you're reading jbofi'e's output incorrectly.  le'o ru'e ("no
offense").

(0[xu {do <(1se nandu)1 (1lo [nu {do <tavla (2[mi {fo <la lojban>}] [lo {nu <do tatpi>}])2>}])1>}])0

See the (1...)1 section?  That's grabbing the entire sentence after
"se nandu".  This means that everyhting to the right of "se nandu"
is ending up in the second place of "se nandu".  Not what you wante.

In particular, note that (2...)2, which is the stuff that fills the
places of tavla, includes the second "lo nu".

> However, when writing it, I was not sure if I needed to have a
> {kei} after {la lojban.}. I know {cu} makes it so you don't need
> terminators in situations like these, but what exactly makes it so
> that {lonu do tatpi} does not run into the {tavla} clause here?

A terminator on the first "lo nu" clause.

The way that xorxes and I handle this in long-form writing is to
move "lo nu" clauses in front of the selbri.  I also find "se nandu"
cumbersome in this case, so I'd just do:

xu lo nu lojbo tavla cu nandu do lo nu do tatpi

If you wanted to keep your original structure:

xu do lo nu do tavla mi fo la lojban. cu se nandu lo nu do tatpi

> Also, just subjectively, is it somewhat..."polite" to include a
> {kei} here even though it's not grammatically needed?

The only time I included un-needed terminators is when *I* am
confused.  :)

-Robin

--
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm  thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other  than  the default  outcome?"  See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/