Subject: Re: [lojban] Introduction, and zutse/se sutse

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 13:54:47 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001 [email-masked] wrote:

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

.uicai fi'i djan.

> 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.

It doesn't! It simply means that the grammar is parseable by a program.
Experienced Lojbanists routinely confuse each other, and many structures
in the language are definitely vague, like the tanru.

> 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.

OK, let's say the stizu is a chair which someone has sat in, and which was
designed for sitting. Let's see you define sit and chair. Specify whether
a cat box is a type of chair. How about a petri dish? (Are the bacteria
sitting? or standing up?)

> Thanks in advance,

You're welcome, although you probably have retracted the thanks by now!

> co'o mi'e djan.

-- 
I hope they confuse the two and toss away the lit flare while holding
the lit dynamite stick as a statue of Liberty Torch. That would make my
day- for at least a 1/4 hour. -- Fernando