Subject: nolraitru

From: "Newton, Philip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 10:03:37 +0200

How would you expand "nolraitru" (meaning "king") into a tanru?

The obvious "nobli traji turni" doesn't make sense to me, since that is
"(nobli traji) turni", i.e. "(noble type-of superlative) type-of governor".

I would have expected either "nobli ke traji turni" = "nobli (traji turni)"
= "noble type-of (superlative type-of governor)" or "traji nobli turni" =
"(traji nobli) turni" = "(superlative type-of noble) type-of governor".

(Incidentally, is it possible to express "traji nobli turni" with the word
order "nobli traji turni" by using cmavo? I tried "nobli co traji turni",
intending "(nobli co traji) turni" but the co attached not the "traji" but
the whole "traji turni" to the "nobli". And "ke nobli co traji ke'e turni"
was rejected by jbofi'e as ungrammatical.)

Two plausible explanations come to my mind:

(1) The Lojban idiom for "most broda" may not be "traji broda" as English,
but "broda traji".

"Most interesting" seems to be to be "superlatively interesting", but Lojban
might well have it as "interestingly superlative", emphasising the fact that
it is superlative and using the modifier to indicate in what the
superlativity(?) lies, rather than indicating that something is interesting
and using the modifier to indicate the superlative degree.

In this case, "nobli traji turni" would parse idiomatically as
"superlatively-noble governor", which makes sense to me.

(2) lujvo need not expand to the most obvious tanru, so that "nolraitru"
means not necessarily "nobli traji turni" but "something to do with nobli,
and traji, and turni (unordered(?))". Is that so? I seem to recall reading
somewhere that lujvo were a bit free as to how things were expressed -- for
example, that one could leave out things such as "ke", "ke'e", "nu", ... if
the result is "logical" as a lujvo.

Is either of those explanations correct? If not, how is "nolraitru" to be
parsed?

mu'omi'e filip.
[email copies appreciated, since I read the digest]
{ko fukpi mrilu .i'o fi mi ki'u le du'u mi te mrilu loi notseljmaji}
-- 
Philip Newton <[email-masked]>
All opinions are my own, not my employer's.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.