[lojban] Dereferencing sumti referring to selbri

[Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se>]

Hi,

More than once I've wanted to convert a sumti referring to a selbri into
an actual selbri.  For example, there's a lojbanist named {cizra} and
there's a weird lojbanist named {.LOkadin.}.  How can we express this
question in Lojban?

    .i la .LOkadin. [what?] lo cmene be lo jbopre

The name of cizra refers to a selbri, and to complete the above sentence
we need a way to convert an indirectly, _mentioned_ selbri into an
actual grammatically _used_ selbri.  Now, {la'e zo cizra} refers to the
meaning of the word {cizra}, which gets us halfway, and {me} converts
the sumti into a grammatical selbri, so it would seem to take us the
rest of the way.  However, {me} only creates a kind of weak identity
predicate: {srana be la'e zo cizra} or {dunli be la'e zo cizra}.
Neither of these words are adequate; we need the grammar of {me} but no
semantics other than those of {la'e}.  We can get by with {ckaji tu'a}:

    .i la .LOkadin. ckaji tu'a lo cmene be lo jbopre

But it would be nice if we had a more precise way to make this
conversion and retain the place structure of the selbri, so that we
could ask,

    .i la .LOkadin. [what?] lo cmene be la cizra fi ma

In other words, what we need is a way to convert a quotation of a selbri
into an actual grammatical selbri with its full place structure.

Let's call this hypothetical word {me'ei} (mnemonic: {me} + {selbri}).
Then we could say,

    .i la .LOkadin. me'ei lo jbocmene lo to po'o nai toi ka ciska tadji

When you think about this, you realize that what you have is essentially
a very easy way to create nonce fu'ivla:

    .i mi citka lo me'ei zoi fy. crème brûlée .fy.

The canonical way to do this is with a so-called stage-1 fu'ivla:

    .i mi citka lo me la'o fy. crème brûlée .fy.

What you can't do with a stage-1 fu'ivla, however, is import transient
verbs or other multi-argument predicates into Lojban.  This is why we
have the (unofficial) convention of "stage-0" fu'ivla:

    .i mi na'e -fluent la .lojban.

If you add {me'ei} to your toolbox, you can do this sort of thing
without resorting to the extra-linguistic hyphen device:

    .i mi na'e me'ei zo'oi fluent la .lojban.

Does anyone think adding something like {me'ei} would be a good idea?



-- 
Daniel Brockman
daniel@brockman.se


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