[lojban] Re: selbri fa place and gadri question

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have two questions.  The first is: why MUST the x1 place (un-marked with
> se/fa) always be to the left of the selbri?  What was the design decision
> that leads {nelci mi do} to mean "someone (unspecified) likes me having
> something to do with you" instead of the seemingly obvious "like, I do you"
> -> "I like you".

I wasn't there, but the received lore is that this was because when
you transform a selbri into a sumti, you want the slot following the
selbri to be the x2 slot: "lo nelci be do", "likers of you", because
the x1 slot is the one picked by "lo".

OTOH, when transforming a selbri into a tag, it is the x1 slot that
follows the selbri "fi'o nelci do", "with you as liker", so that
explanation is not completely satisfying.

> My second question came about when I was trying to think of how one might
> word my first question in lojban.  I quickly realized that I needed a gadri
> that gets at the defining form of a word.  So I wanted to say {ma lo krinu
> lo nu __ selbri cu se smuni ...}

(ma krinu lo nu ...)

> where the "__" is some gadri which means
> "that x which defines what is a(n) x".  So maybe another way to think about
> it would be, how would you say "lions are animals".

.i lo cinfo cu danlu

.i ma krinu lo nu lo na'e se tcita sumti be fi li pa cu .ei lidne lo se sumti

> Am I saying "the
> typical"?  Not really, because all lions by definition are animals.  It's
> not quite {ro da} either because I'm not talking about "all lions" but about
> "that quintessential lion (theoretical) which defines how lion-y a real
> world thing is".

"Lions" is the basic meaning of "lo cinfo". It can also be used to
refer to a particular lion or particular lions if they are especially
salient in some context (i.e. restricted to something like "lions in
this context") but without any context "lo cinfo" would just be lions
in general.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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