[lojban] More than you wanted to know about talking about selma'o in Lojban

[Kevin Reid <kpreid@switchb.org>]

[This post is mostly to get my thoughts on a particular matter  
published, rather than any particular current need or a request to  
discuss it.]

Someone asked recently on #lojban how to refer to a selma'o in Lojban.  
As you know, in English discussion we conventionally use the  
identifiers like LAhE, BAI, COI, etc. -- but considered as Lojban  
words, these are either invalid (due to 'h') or just stressed forms of  
the particular cmavo rather than their classes.

The most logically correct way I have thought of to talk about selma'o  
is to just use "selma'o".

The place structure of {selma'o}, or {se cmavo}, is "x1 is the  
grammatical class of structure word x2 ...". Therefore, the Lojbanic  
analog of "LAhE" is:

  lo selma'o be zo la'e

Should it feel unclean to you to use an arbitrary cmavo in the  
designation of its selma'o, note that mathematicians do it too: this  
is precisely analogous to the mathematical notation used for an  
_equivalence class_:
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_class>

(Actually, if you wanted to talk about an *actual* equivalence class,  
i.e. a set which is that subset of all cmavo, that would be "lo'i  
cmavo be lo selma'o be zo la'e" -- except that it's debatable whether  
that is actually different from "lo selma'o be zo la'e"; the former is  
a pure mathematical set of cmavo and the latter is a selma'o, which is  
arguably a set-with-extra-information.)

--
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>




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