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

[Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>]

On Sunday, May 31, 2015 15:56:08 Michael Everson wrote:
> I guess I thought of lu/li’u and sei/se’u like opening and closing
> parentheses and having open parentheses in the language for both of those
> pairs but mandatory closing parentheses only for one of them doesn’t seem
> consistent.
> > {sei} and bridi tails have different grammar. The selbri itself terminates
> > {sei}-clause, thus the end of {sei}-clause is 100%-predictable. When the
> > selbri is encountered it's the signal that {sei}-clause just ended.
> Only if you know what a selbri is (or whether or not a given word is a
> selbri). And that means knowledge of the language, unless selbris are
> identifiable by their syllable structure or something. If not, then
> external knowledge must be there to identify the members of a class called
> selbri.

A brivla (a single-word selbri) is identifiable by ending in a vowel other than 
'y', having at least two syllables whose nucleus is a vowel or diphthong not 
containing 'y', and having two consonants either together or separated by 'y'. 
There are corner cases involving cmavo ending in 'y' (e.g. "leky.boi mlatu" 
means "K's cat", "lekyboi mlatu" means "is a cold-ball cat"), but writing 
cmavo ending in 'y' together with both adjacent cmavo (unless they also end in 
'y' or are "bu"-letterals) is pretty rare.

> By the way as a linguist I find Lojban to be completely opaque in not using
> words like verb or noun or adjective.

Brivla are verbs, cmene are nouns, and there are no adjectives or adverbs in 
Lojban. The equivalent of a noun phrase is an article phrase, as adding an 
article to a verb makes it syntactically like a verb argument (sumti). Common 
nouns are expressed by verbs. There is no syntactic difference between "le 
mlatu cu blabi" ("the cat is white") and "le blabi cu mlatu" (*"the white is 
cat", "the white one is a cat"). There are parts of speech in Lojban that 
don't exist in natlangs that I know of, such as terminators.

Pierre
-- 
loi mintu se ckaji danlu cu jmaji

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