Subject: Re: [lojban] Correct terminator(s)?

From: Jay F Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 08:10:11 -0600

On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 01:18:11PM -0000, elder_newton wrote:
> mi skicu lenu mi tcidu le cukta ku ku do
> .i mi skicu lenu mi tcidu le cukta kei do
> .i mi skicu lenu mi tcidu le cukta kei ku do
> .i mi skicu lenu mi tcidu le cukta ku kei do
> 
> I presume they can't all be correct -- or can they? If they are, is 
> there a difference? Which would be the preferred way? If none is 
> correct, what would be the correct way to say it?

I feel it is worth pointing out exactly which things each of those
terminators terminate.

le
| nu
| | mi
| | tcidu
| | le
| | | cukta
| | ku
| kei
ku

kei is the shortest in this case, as it ends the selbri following le. But
what if you were going to place another selbri immediately afterwards,
for instance, if you wanted "le nu mi tcidu le cukta" at the beginning
of your bridi? Obviously you could use 'cu', but lets say you didn't:

le nu mi tcidu le cukta se skicu mi do

Obviously wrong, cu before the se could fix it, but say you tried kei
instead:

le nu mi tcidu le cukta kei se skicu mi do

Still wrong. "nu ... kei" is a selbri, which in the above case forms a
tanru with "se skicu".

le nu mi tcidu le cukta kei ku se skicu mi do

Is correct. The 'kei' terminates the bridi inside of nu, which also does
the job of terminating 'le cukta'. Then the 'ku' terminates the 'le' before
that, preventing 'nu ... kei' from modifying 'se skicu'.

A tad outside of the scope of the original question, but I felt it was
worth explaining what was going on. (And I hope I did so.)

-- 
Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Think about Python, and whitespace. -- Larry Wall