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Re: [lojban] [oz] Use of elidable {cu}
la .asiz. cu cusku di'e
I know about the "cmevla as brivla" rule in the translation grammar. But
still there remains a great amount of elidable {cu} occurrences
throughout the text.
There may be some that really are elidible, but I'm fairly sure that
most of the {cu} that seem elidible actually are not. I will explain why
below.
E.g.,
(1) {lo zdŕni cu pu se cintypu'i}
(2) {la nakfŕmti .xčnris. cu no roi cměla}
These two are truly stylistic choices, but there is an advantage to
using {cu} before TENSE+selbri. It makes it less likely to accidently
say something like the following (at least I assume that's true):
lo nu broda pu cinri
! "The event of brodaing in the past is interesting."
Using {cu} before {pu} is necessary there to prevent the accidental
slipping of the {pu} into the abstraction. So maybe that's one reason to
use {cu} even when it's not necessary: to be less likely to forget it
where it must be used.
(3) {xy ji'a cu grůsi}
(4) {ca lo cŕbdei cu na kčlci}
Probably the same habit as in (1) and (2).
Granted, these are perfectly correct. It just made me curious to hear
any thoughts you have on the usage of {cu}.
In any case, the common usage exemplified above seems inconsistent with
more rare examples such as
(5) {sei ny spůda}
(6) {sei ny spůsku} (3 times)
(7) {pa la mŕxpre pu pňnse}
(8) {la .oz. na důnda lo bčsna do}
(9) {la .tňtos. ca lo nůncfa na nčlci lo vi ziljměna be lo bčnde}
(10) {la .dňrotis. na sai ka'e věska}
(11) {la .tňtos. ja'a ka'e go'i}
The actual answer to your question is this: What happens when you erase
all the spaces from the text? The answer to this question will reveal
why there are {cu} in seemingly unnecessary places. To name just one
general example ({nu} is by far not the only place where it occurs):
{nu + BY + broda} = lujvo (nuBYbroda}
{nu + BY + cu + broda} = abstraction containing a bridi
In other words, leaving out {cu} will make the text parse differently!
I'm very careful with that; one needs to keep in mind that the whole
point of my orthography is to have full audio-visual isomorphism - the
speech stream should fully correspond to the string of letters. There
are no spaces in the speech stream. Everything depends on clusters and
stress. Therefore, spaces are to be meaningless in writing, too. And my
orthography enables exactly that: to omit all the spaces. You can either
use {cu} to prevent the accidental lujvo as in the example above, or you
can use a glottal stop, like so:
{nu + BY. + broda}
Then, it also cannot parse as a single word.
You will find both methods used in the text.
mi'e la selpa'i mu'o
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