Re: [lojban] lo jbove'a cukta

[Remo Dentato <rdentato@gmail.com>]

On Friday, September 10, 2010, Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com> wrote:
> While you and others may not agree, I have spent a LOT of time in the
> past two months teaching students, and I find that they all have a
> much better grasp of terminators, and thus have fewer problems
> understanding the grammar in general, when {cu} is not taught.
....
> So, while you may not understand the argument, I do ask of you that
> you leave the terminators in and only use {cu} where I have done so.

Actually i feel absolutely unqualified to have a theoretical opinion
on this. I' m just as newbie as I was last year.

Having a programmer's background I do understand "ku" and friends as
closing braces so I see that once you use them you don't need cu
because there's no possible confusion.

What I don't understand is why "cu" should be considered a shortcut or
a "goto" (as someone suggested).

I see it as a separator like ":" in the C ternary operator  "x?y:z".
So, in my mind, I have:
     "le karce ku klama" -> "{karce} klama"
and
     "le karce cu klama" -> "karce : klama"

I still have a great difficulty in reading lojban, it appears too
"flat" to my eyes. I spend a lot of time visually scanning the text to
find "hooks" from which I can start identify the grammatical elements.
One of this hooks I've become used to look for is "cu" because I think
I can reasonably expect to find the main brivla after it. I don't feel
the same with "ku" as it appears to me as potentially just being
closing a sumti, with no indication about the main brivla.

That's the reason I tend to use "cu" and elide "ku" rather than the
other way around. It makes easier to myself to read the text back. Of
course I tend to think that what is helpful to me it's helpful for
others too, but this might be just my selfish ego :)

When I started the translation, My objective was to learn more lojban
and I set two standards for my translation:

 1 it must be grammatical
 2 it must convey the original meaning as much as possible

and for now I feel I've met my objective within those standards at the
best of my knowledge.

I know that my translation can be made better in many aspects, both
from a style and a grammar perpective but, at the moment, it reflects
my current understanding of lojban.

I hope I could produce better translations in the future with the help
and comments of the lojban community, and also that those translations
will meet higher standards. For now I would feel uncomfortable to drop
the "cu" (and thus abandoning my visual hooks) without a deeper
understanding of what the benfits are, when I'll learn more I'll maybe
develop a different reading habit and might use a different style.

remod

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