Subject: Re: [lojban] Reading lojban textbook

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 22:55:11

la and cusku di'e

>I find there to be a persistent and insidious ambiguity in Lojban
>between grammatical categories and logical ones. So it seems to me as 
>though Sumti can be a relation between phrases or between
>things.

There is an ambiguity. The word "sumti" in English is used for
things like "ko'a", "le klama", "zo mamta", "le ka melbi", and
so on, based just on their form, and independently of whether
or not they are used in any predication. We say "le klama" is
a sumti.

I suppose we could say in Lojban something like:

lu le zarci li'u sumti lu mi klama le zarci li'u li re

That would mean that "le zarci" is a sumti in its relationship
with "mi klama le zarci", not all by itself.

However, the way I interpret the gi'uste, the use in Lojban
should be something more like:

lo'e zukte cu sumti le du'u ce'u dunda ce'u ce'u kei li pa
"The first argument of the dunda-relationship is an agent.

Most of these words suffer similar ambiguities.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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