Subject: RE: [lojban] selma'o

From: "Craig" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 23:06:54 -0400

As a child, I knew that I could say "the lawyer is honest" or "a lawyer is
honest" but not "of lawyer is honest" before I knew that that was because
the and a are articles while of is a preposition. I got it right, too. I'm
learning lojban. trying to learn the language without the selma'o, since
they confuse me. I'm doing just fine, for someone who's only been at it for
less than one month - it took me almost a year before I could write poetry
in Spanish (and it was even worse than what I've attempted in lojban.). I
think a native speaker would know that they could say "lo vecnu cu melbi" or
"le vecnu cu melbi" but not "mi vecnu cu melbi" as the same structure
grammatically before they had even heard of selma'o. Now of course "mi vecnu
cu melbi" is gramatical lojban. but it means "The salesman thinks I'm
beautiful" rather than "the salesman is beautiful" - a distinction they'd
pick up pretty quick. Now as for your assertion that you can't learn lojban.
by imitation, how would we ever have native speakers? It's bound to be
possible, the language is more learnable than others (at least I'm picking
it up faster than I picked up Spanish and when I tried Quechua after a month
I was able to mostly conjugate verbs and knew around five words - I was
doing badly enough that I gave it up, which I am not for lojban.).

-----Original Message-----
From: Jorge Llambias [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 2:54 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [lojban] selma'o

la kreig cusku di'e

> Why do we need selma'o? I've been learning better by ignoring them,

How do you manage to write any grammatical sentence by ignoring
selma'o? Words in a given selma'o are all the words that can
occupy a given position in a sentence. For example, you can't
use {mi} as a gadri, that's why {mi} and {le} belong to different
selma'o.

>and I'm
>sure if we had native speakers then when they were little babies learning
>lojban., all selma'o would do is confuse them.

Of course, little babies would not learn about selma'o until they
go to school, just as we don't teach little babies about verbs
and nouns and articles and prepositions.

>They probably wouldn't even
>learn them! They don't seem to serve any real purpose, either. Is there
>something I'm missing, or was it just "Hey, let's put the cmavo in these
>groups we don't need for no reason!"

It would be great if you can learn Lojban just from imitation,
ignoring what selma'o are for, and still use the language correctly,
it would show that the language is quite robust.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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