Re: [lojban] si and quotes

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> hmm, yeah, that's a good question.  I don't know if anyone has formally
> worked out lo'ai sa'ai le'ai.  Maybe I should learn PEG and write up a
> proposed formal definition.  How does the grammar treat to ... toi?

It's a simple free modifier: "to (text) toi". It can be inserted
(almost) anywhere in another text.

> I would
> think that lo'ai sa'ai le'ai would have a similar structure. I see it as a
> metalinguistic comment about previous statements.  I'm guessing that it
> would probably be too complex to have the grammar go back and make the
> actual substitutions.

Ah, yes, I now seem to recall something like that.

But internally it's more like "lo'u ... le'u" in the sense that it
surrounds any number of words without caring about their selma'o,
right? I fact that's probably where "lo'ai" and "le'ai" come from. If
so, one "si" would delete the whole structure.

> And it could cause problems if one did something like ".ui mi nelci lo
> selsa'a beme'e lu zo si si si li'u" which, I'm not sure how that would
> behave.  zo si si gets negated and then the third si kills lu then another
> zo si si kills itself and another third si kills me'e.

Right, you'd have to quote it with "lo'u ... le'u", or else use two
dummy words after "lu" if you wanted to preserve the grammatical
structure of the song.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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