Re: [lojban] [oz] Use of elidable {cu}

On 6 January 2014 20:22, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

la .asiz. cu cusku di'e

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.

On 6 January 2014 20:36, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 8:22 PM, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

lo nu broda pu cinri
! "The event of brodaing in the past is interesting."

Actually it's even worse than that, it's just a sumti: "the brodaing in the past type of interesting thing."

I just checked the parse. This completely breaks my mental grammar! I feel that the natural place of tenses is just before the selbri, and anywhere else they ought to be followed by either a sumti or {ku}. It is so much simpler to add a {ku} whenever we want an out of place tense. I have little hope that the grammar be reviewed, but don't you feel the same?

It only baffles me more that it works differently for negation. Am I safe to omit {cu} whenever there is a {na}?

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.

That is very reasonable. I still find it much easier to use a glottal stop after every Cy not followed by another one, since you need it sooner or later and I just don't have the mental power to evaluate, in practical time, when it is safe to skip it.

mu'o
mi'e .asiz.