John Woldemar Cowan

“ There is a problem when we want to say “The fast one is talking.” The “obvious” translation “le sutra tavla” turns out to mean “the fast talker”, and has no selbri at all. To solve this problem we can use the word “cu”, which so far has always been optional, in front of the selbri.
The word “cu” has no meaning, and exists only to mark the beginning of the selbri within the bridi, separating it from a previous sumti. It comes before any other part of the selbri, including other cmavo like “se” or “te”. ”

“ In addition to the attitudinals, there are other classes of indicators: intensity markers, emotion categories, attitudinal modifiers, observationals, and discursives. All of them are grammatically equivalent, which is why they are treated together in this chapter.
Every indicator behaves in more or less the same way with respect to the grammar of the rest of the language. In general, one or more indicators can be inserted at the beginning of an utterance or after any word. Indicators at the beginning apply to the whole utterance; otherwise, they apply to the word that they follow. ”

“ Why is “lau” necessary at all? Why not just use a “bu”-marked word and announce that it is always to be interpreted as a punctuation mark? Primarily to avoid ambiguity. The “bu” mechanism is extremely open-ended, and it is easy for Lojban users to make up “bu” words without bothering to explain what they mean. Using the “lau” cmavo flags at least the most important of such nonce lerfu words as having a special function: punctuation. (Exactly the same argument applies to the use of “zai” to signal an alphabet shift or “ce'a” to signal a font shift.) ”

“ What are pro-sumti and pro-bridi? What are they for? Speakers of Lojban, like speakers of other languages, require mechanisms of abbreviation. If every time we referred to something, we had to express a complete description of it, life would be too short to say what we have to say. ”

“ I know the predication that Frank is a fool. Now we have it. Note that the implied assertion “Frank is a fool” is not a property of “le du'u” abstraction, but of “djuno”; we can only know what is in fact true. (As a result, “djuno” like “jei” has a place for epistemology, which specifies how we know.) ”

“ But what exactly does “na'e” negate? Does the negation include only the gismu “klama”, which is the entire selbri in this case, or does it include the “le zarci” as well? In Lojban, the answer is unambiguously “only the gismu”. The cmavo “na'e” always applies only to what follows it. ”

“ Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguously resolves its sounds into words. Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn. Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words. Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exceptions. Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication. Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical. Lojban has been demonstrated in translation and in original works of prose and poetry. ”

“ As you can see, it is easy to get lost in the world of reverse Polish notation; on the other hand, it is especially easy for a mechanical listener (who has a deep mental stack and doesn’t get lost) to comprehend.
The operands of an RP operator can be any legal mekso operand, including parenthesized mekso that can contain any valid syntax, whether more RP or something more conventional.
In Lojban, RP operators are always parsed with exactly two operands. What about operators which require only one operand, or more than two operands? ”

“ Any two words may have a pause between them; it is always illegal to pause in the middle of a word, because that breaks up the word into two words. Every word ending in a consonant must be followed by a pause. Necessarily, all such words are cmene. Every word beginning with a vowel must be preceded by a pause. Such words are either cmavo, fu'ivla, or cmene; all gismu and lujvo begin with consonants. ”

“ In the case of mass and set descriptors, a single rule suffices for each: reference to a mass is implicitly a reference to some part of the mass; reference to a set is implicitly a reference to the whole set. Masses and sets are inherently singular objects: it makes no sense to talk about two distinct masses with the same components, or two distinct sets with the same members. Therefore, the largest possible outer quantifier for either a set description or a mass description is “piro”, the whole of it. ”

“ A given lujvo still has exactly one meaning and place structure. It is just that more than one tanru is competing for the same lujvo. But more than one meaning for the tanru was already competing for the “right” to define the meaning of the lujvo. Someone has to use judgment in deciding which one meaning is to be chosen over the others.
If the lujvo made by a shorter form of tanru is in use, or is likely to be useful for another meaning, the decider then retains one or more of the cmavo, preferably ones that set this meaning apart from the shorter form meaning that is used or anticipated. ”

“ In Example 2.4, the literal interpretation of the two variables “da” and “de” as “there-is-an-X” and “there-is-a-Y” tells us that there are two things which stand in the relationship that one loves the other. It might be the case that the supposed two things are really just a single thing that loves itself; nothing in the Lojban version of Example 2.4 rules out that interpretation, which is why the colloquial translation does not say “Somebody loves somebody else.” ”

“ Here “John is a man” and “James is a woman” are the component sentences.
We will use the phrase “negating a sentence” to mean changing its truth value. An English sentence may always be negated by prefixing “It is false that ... ”, or more idiomatically by inserting “not” at the right point, generally before the verb. “James is not a woman” is the negation of “James is a woman”, and vice versa. Recent slang can also negate a sentence by following it with the exclamation “Not!”
Words like “or” are called “logical connectives”, and Lojban has many of them, as befits a logical language. ”

“ What is the referent of “ti”? Is it the person? Or perhaps it is the person’s nose? Or even (for “ti” can be plural as well as singular, and mean “these ones” as well as “this one”) the pores on the person’s nose?
To help solve this problem, Lojban uses a construction called a “relative clause”. Relative clauses are usually attached to the end of sumti, but there are other places where they can go as well, as explained later in this chapter. A relative clause begins with a word of selma'o NOI, and ends with the elidable terminator “ku'o” (of selma'o KUhO) . ”

“ You can express an attitude without a scale indicator, if you don’t want to stop and think about how strongly you feel. Indeed, for most attitudinals, we’ve found that either no scalar value is used, or “cai” is used to indicate especially high intensity. Less often, “ru'e” is used for a recognizably weak intensity, and “cu'i” is used in response to the attitudinal question “pei” (see Section 10) to indicate that the emotion is not felt. ”

“ You are six years less young than me. In English, “more” comparatives are easier to make and use than “less” comparatives, but in Lojban the two forms are equally easy.
Because of their much simpler place structure, lujvo ending in “-mau” and “-me'a” are in fact used much more frequently than “zmadu” and “mleca” themselves as selbri. It is highly unlikely for such lujvo to be construed as anything other than implicit-abstraction lujvo. But there is another type of ambiguity relevant to these lujvo, and which has to do with what is being compared. ”

“ Thus, to erase just the word quoted by “zo”, it turns out to be necessary to erase the “zo” as well:
13.6) mi se cmene zo .djan. si si zo .djordj. I am-named-by the-word “John”, er, er, the-word “George”. The parser will reject “zo .djan. si .djordj.”, because in that context “djordj.” is a name (of selma'o CMENE) rather than a quoted word.
Note: The current machine parser does not implement “si” erasure.
As the above examples plainly show, precise erasures with “si” can be extremely hard to get right. Therefore, the cmavo “sa” (of selma'o SA) is provided for erasing more than one word. ”

“ In natural languages, the mark of metalinguistic negation is that an indication of a correct statement always, or almost always, follows the negation. Tone of voice or emphasis may be further used to clarify the error.
Negations of every sort must be expressible in Lojban; errors are inherent to human thought, and are not excluded from the language. When such negations are metalinguistic, we must separate them from logical claims about the truth or falsity of the statement, as well as from scalar negations which may not easily express (or imply) the preferred claim. ”

“ It is valid to use any of the rafsi forms in building lujvo — whichever the reader or listener will most easily understand, or whichever is most pleasing — subject to the rules of lujvo making. There is a scoring algorithm which is intended to determine which of the possible and legal lujvo forms will be the standard dictionary form (see Section 12) .
Each gismu always has at least two rafsi forms; one is the gismu itself (used only at the end of a lujvo) , and one is the gismu without its final vowel (used only at the beginning or middle of a lujvo) . ”

“ In English, the words “this” and “that” serve this function among others: “this” refers to something pointed at that is near the speaker, and “that” refers to something further away. The Lojban pro-sumti of the ti-series serve the same functions, but more narrowly. The cmavo “ti”, “ta”, and “tu” provide only the pointing function of “this” and “that”; they are not used to refer to things that cannot be pointed at.
There are three pro-sumti of the ti-series rather than just two because it is often useful to distinguish between objects that are at more than two different distances. ”

“ Lojban considers matrices to be built up out of vectors, which are in turn built up out of operands.
“jo'i”, the only cmavo of selma'o JOhI, is the vector indicator: it has a syntax reminiscent of a forethought operator, but has very high precedence. The components must be simple operands rather than full expressions (unless parenthesized) . A vector can have any number of components; “te'u” is the elidable terminator. ”

“ There are a lot of rats. The mass of rats is small because at least one rat is small; the mass of rats is also large; the set of rats, though, is unquestionably large — it has billions of members. The mass of rats is also brown, since some of its components are; but it would be incorrect to call the set of rats brown — brown-ness is not the sort of property that sets possess.
Lojban speakers should generally think twice before employing the set descriptors. However, certain predicates have places that require set sumti to fill them. ”

“ Description sumti Often we wish to talk about things other than the speaker, the listener and things we can point to. Let’s say I want to talk about a talker other than “mi”. What I want to talk about would naturally fit into the first place of “tavla”. Lojban, it turns out, has an operator that pulls this first place out of a selbri and converts it to a sumti called a “description sumti”. The description sumti “le tavla ku” means “the talker”, and may be used wherever any sumti may be used. ”

“ They also may be able to use the Lojban system as a means for more clearly recording emotions.
The full list of scales and attitudes will probably not be used until someone speaks the language from birth. Until then, people will use the attitudes that are important to them. In this way, we counter cultural bias — if a culture is prone to recognizing and/or expressing certain emotions more than others, its members will use only those out of the enormous set available. If a culture hides certain emotions, its members simply won’t express them. ”

“ The first is that it might be very difficult for a hearer or reader, who has no preconceived idea of what concept the lujvo is intended to convey, to work out what the place structure actually is. Instead, he or she would have to make use of a lujvo dictionary every time a lujvo is encountered in order to work out what a “se jbopli” or a “te klagau” is. But this would mean that, rather than having to learn just the 1300-odd gismu place structures, a Lojbanist would also have to learn myriads of lujvo place structures with little or no apparent pattern or regularity to them. ”

“ If a lujvo is invented which involves the same tanru as one that is in the dictionary, and is assigned a different meaning (or even just a different place structure) , linguistic drift results. This isn't necessarily bad. Every natural language does it. But in communication, when you use a meaning different from the dictionary definition, someone else may use the dictionary and therefore misunderstand you. You can use the cmavo za'e (explained in Section 19.11 (p. 460) ) before a newly coined lujvo to indicate that it may have a non-dictionary meaning. ”

“ Frank and George, who are men, go to the house. The presence of “vu'o” here means that the relative clause “noi nanmu” extends to the entire logically connected sumti “la frank. .e la djordj.”; in other words, both Frank and George are claimed to be men, as the colloquial translation shows.
English is able to resolve the distinction correctly in the case of Example 8.5 and Example 8.6 by making use of number: “who is” rather than “who are”. Lojban doesn’t distinguish between singular and plural verbs: “nanmu” can mean “is a man” or “are men”, so another means is required. ”

“ A negation using “na” denies the truth of a relationship, but a selbri negation with “na'e” asserts that a relationship exists other than that stated, one which specifically involves the sumti identified in the statement. The grammar allotted to “na'e” allows us to unambiguously express scalar negations in terms of scope, scale, and range within the scale. Before we explain the scalar aspects, let us show how the scope of “na'e” is determined. ”

“ In Lojban, the term “hyphen” always refers to a letter, either the vowel “y” or one of the consonants “r” and “n”. (The letter “l” can also be a hyphen, but is not used as one in lujvo.)
The “y”-hyphen is used after a CVC-form rafsi when joining it with the following rafsi could result in an impermissible consonant pair, or when the resulting lujvo could fall apart into two or more words (either cmavo or gismu) .
Thus, the tanru “pante tavla” (“protest talk”) cannot produce the lujvo “patta'a”, because “tt” is not a permissible consonant pair; the lujvo must be “patyta'a”. ”

“ In Lojban we make no such grammatical distinctions; these three sentences, when expressed in Lojban, are structurally identical. The same part of speech is used to represent the relationship. In formal logic this whole structure is called a “predication”; in Lojban it is called a “bridi”, and the central part of speech is the “selbri”. Logicians refer to the things thus related as “arguments”, while Lojbanists call them “sumti”. These Lojban terms will be used for the rest of the book.
In a relationship, there are a definite number of things being related. ”

“ I know who goes to the store. Vocative scales “Vocatives” are words used to address someone directly; they precede and mark a name used in direct address, just as “la” (and the other members of selma'o LA) mark a name used to refer to someone. The vocatives actually are indicators — in fact, discursives — but the need to tie them to names and other descriptions of listeners requires them to be separated from selma'o UI. But like the cmavo of UI, the members of selma'o COI can be “negated” with “nai” to get the opposite part of the scale. ”

“ All that is essential is that the place structure of “zdani” continues to apply.
For something (call it z1) to qualify as a “gerku zdani” in Lojban, it’s got to be a house, first of all. For it to be a house, it’s got to house someone (call that z2) . Furthermore, there’s got to be a dog somewhere (called g1) . For g1 to count as a dog in Lojban, it’s got to belong to some breed as well (called g2) . And finally, for z1 to be in the first place of “gerku zdani”, as opposed to just “zdani”, there’s got to be some relationship (called r) between some place of “zdani” and some place of “gerku”. ”

“ Finally, there are the cultural gismu, which are also borrowed, but by modifying a word from one particular language, instead of using the multi-lingual gismu creation algorithm. Cultural gismu are used for words that have local importance to a particular culture; other cultures or languages may have no word for the concept at all, or may borrow the word from its home culture, just as Lojban does. In such a case, the gismu algorithm, which uses weighted averages, doesn't accurately represent the frequency of usage of the individual concept. ”

“ Unlike the tanru, though, the emotional expressions are built on some fairly nebulous root emotions — words that cannot be defined with the precision of the gismu. The emotion words of Lojban will very quickly take on a life of their own, and the outline given here will evolve into a true system of emotions.
There are several theories as to the nature of emotion, and they change from year to year as we learn more about ourselves. Whether or not Lojban’s additive/scalar emotional model is an accurate model for human emotions, it does support the linguistic needs for expressing those emotions. ”

“ There are actually three levels of stress – primary, secondary, and weak. Weak stress is the lowest level, so it really means no stress at all. Weak stress is required for syllables containing y, a syllabic consonant, or a buffer vowel.
Primary stress is required on the penultimate syllable of Lojban content words (called brivla) . Lojbanized names may be stressed on any syllable, but if a syllable other than the penultimate is stressed, the syllable (or at least its vowel) must be capitalized in writing. Lojban structural words (called cmavo) may be stressed on any syllable or none at all. ”

“ In particular, “fagyfesti” has a distinct place structure of its own, not the same as that of “festi”. (In contrast, the tanru does have the same place structure as “festi”.) The lujvo needs to take account of the places of “fagri” as well. When a tanru is made into a lujvo, there is no equivalent of “be ... bei ... be'o” (described in Chapter 5) to incorporate sumti into the middle of the lujvo.
So why have lujvo? Primarily to reduce semantic ambiguity. On hearing a tanru, there is a burden on the listener to figure out what the tanru might mean. ”