Re: [lojban] {la .alis.} book

[Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>]

On 27 May 2015, at 01:30, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> The terminator for "sei" is "se'u", but it is very often elidible.
>> 
>> Well, it’s YOUR language, guys, but that pretty much defeats the predictability of the system. If you have sei/se’u alongside lu/li’u, why can on be elided but the other not?
> 
> "li'u" can be elided sometimes too, but less often. The reason is that the type of things that sei-se'u can bracket is much more restricted than the type of things lu-li'u can bracket.

“Can be elided sometimes”. What are the rules for choosing? 

>>>> Is the position of a closing em-dash predictable?
>>> 
>>> Yes, but you need to parse the sentence.
>>> 
>> Then it’s not predictable.
> 
> How does that folow? What do you mean by "predictable" then? Given any grammatical utterance, you can know without any ambiguity where the em-dash goes.

You can’t predict without knowing the language, unless you can tell me that every selbri (verb?) has a certain syllable structure and that no other words or particles in the language have that same structure. 

I can predict where to add in guillemets because of the citation particles. Not so with sei/se’u if the latter is left off. And what is the rationale for leaving it off? 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

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