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Re: [lojban] Re: Why does sei work the way it does?

...Hmm. That's interesting, because {sei} has the "metalinguistic" thing built into its definition, while TO is just a parenthesis, so it would seem intuitively like they would have an underlying semantic difference. For example, it makes intuitive sense to use {sei} to say who is speaking in a passage, whereas it doesn't seem to make as much sense to use TO ... TOI to do so, because they're (ostensibly) less specific. Though I suppose there could be an attitudinal for "metalinguistic".

This may help. How would you translate the following in the least awkward way (short of rearranging, of course):
"I'm going", Alice said to Bob, "to the store."
?

By what you're saying, it sounds like it would be:
mi klama to'i la alis. cusku dei la bab. toi le zarci

mu'o mi'e latros.

2010/11/29 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> {sei} is more like {to} than {lo}, lindar.

You can always use "to" or "to'i" instead of "sei". The only reason
SEI exists separate from TO is so that the terminator can almost
always be elided. As it is, "se'u" is practically never needed.
Allowing trailing sumti would mean that "se'u" would almost always be
needed. In that case, it wouldn't have made sense to introduce sei at
all, since there was already to. Semantically, sei and to are
basically the same.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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