Re: Questions ...

[Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>]

la xorxes. cusku di'e

> >{le briju pe mi gunka ke'a cu ponse le samta'a ciste}
> >
> >The office where I work has a computer-talking system
>
> Use {poi} instead of {pe} there. {poi} is for relative clauses,
> {pe} is used to attach another sumti.

AFAIK {le briju poi mi gunka ke'a} would mean "the office that I work", i.e.
"office" is some job I'm doing, rather than the place I'm doing it.  I think
you'd need to say {le briju poi mi gunka tu'i ke'a}.

However, this stikes me as unnecessarily "English-to-Lojban".  I would scrap
the relative clause and say {le briju setu'i lenu mi gunka} - the office
as-location-of the-event-of I work.  I might also consider just saying {le
mi briju}, since office implies a place of work - I would only need to be
specific if I wanted to indicate that I did a particular kind of work there,
or that I do something other than work there, e.g. {le briju setu'i lenu mi
samci'a} or, if I had no professional ethics, {le briju setu'i lenu mi gletu
le mi tadni}

Incidentally, to anyone who is starting out with Lojban and gets confused by
the way asking a supposedly simple question raises a whole lot of other
questions and debates - don't worry!  Most of these threads arise from
trying to translate things from natlnags into Lojban, and tend to arise from
the ambiguity of the natlang in question (usually English) rather than of
Lojban.  For example, we only got into the question of relative clauses here
because the English suggests a relative clause, which is not actually
necessary in Lojban.

My advice, for what it is worth, is, when trying to find a Lojban equivalent
for a natlang expression, first think carefully about what you're trying to
express in the natlang, independent of the expression's grammatical
structure.  Eliminate any extra information conveyed by the expression that
is not absolutely necessary (e.g. tense).  Then choose the simplest Lojban
form that expresses the same thing. In particular, with grammatically
complex English sentences, I generally employ the following principles in
order:

1.  If you can find a tanru that conveys the information without too much
ambiguity, use it.  For example, "the room where the students talk" can be
simply {le tadni tavla kumfa}.

2.  If there's a suitable BAI cmavo, use it.  For example "the woman who is
going to Istanbul" would be {le ninmu seka'a la .istanbul}.

3.  If you can attatch a sumti with {pe} without losing important
information, do so.  Much information can be condensed into "tenses" e.g.
{pe vi} {pe ba} etc. For example, "the book which is on the table" is {le
cukta pe vi le jubme} (this is what I should have done in my earlier
shopping example!)

4.  Then, and only then, use a relative clause with {poi} or {po'u}.

co'o mi'e robin.