For me till now, 'bu' is a rafsi (right?) that means a 'letteral'... What I meant is, why not have a sort of cmene to mean specific lerfu? especially those of other languages? I can't imagine using la for that...
2. Could Lojban be used as a primarily SOV language? Somewhere between chapter 2 and 3 of Lojban for beginners, the writers says that you can 'promote' several sumti to preceed the selbri; does this mean it could act as a complete SOV lang.?