Subject: Introduction, and zutse/se sutse

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 13:33:46 -0500

coi rodo .i mi cnino ke lojbo tavla .i mi gleki lenu mi ca cmima le lojbo
liste

Hi everyone, I'm a newbie to lojban, and I'm glad to be taking part in your
list. I've been fiddling with lojban in small doses for quite some time,
and I think it's really interesting and challenging. For those who are
interested, I'm a 26-year-old electrical engineer, and I've been interested
in conlangs for a number of years. I first learned a bit of Klingon, then
Esperanto to a pretty good level of fluency (which I recently used during a
3-week trip to Brazil where I spoke Esperanto pretty much exclusively) and
now lojban. I especially like how lojban makes me really think about what
I'm saying, and gives me the ability to be completely unambiguous. Anyway,
enough about me.

Since I'm a newbie, I have what may be a newbie question. :) The other day
I was chatting with some folks on us.opirc.org#lojban, (I apologize, but I
don't remember the names of those involved. Most certainly they were all
much more experienced in lojban than I.) and someone said
something to the effect of: .ia ro lo stizu cu se zutse

I interpreted this to mean that all stizu's (chairs) are also (se zutse)'s
(things sat upon). Not so sure I agreed with this, I asked whether stizu's
were se zutse's even if nobody was sitting in them. "Sure they are," was
the answer, with the subsequent discussion basically saying that stizu's are
se zutse's because someone can sit in/on them. If this is really the case,
I think something in my understanding of lojban needs to be adjusted.

If I say "da se zutse [zo'e]", it's the same thing as "[zo'e] zutse da",
right? That is "someone/something is/was/will be sitting in/on X". If
that's right, then it seems to me that "[zo'e] na zutse da" equates to "da
na se zutse [zo'e]". "It is not true that someone/something is/was/will be
sitting in/on X." equates to "X is not a (se zutse)."

Returning to the question of whether all sitzu's are se zutse's, based upon
the above paragraph, it seems to me that if nobody ever has, and never will
sit in a particular chair, then that chair is not a se zutse. I'm not even
quite sure whether my friends in IRC were disagreeing with this fact, though
it certainly seemed like people were arguing that a chair is a (se zutse)
because it is something that one normally sits in. Where am I getting
confused? :)

Thanks in advance, 

co'o mi'e djan.