John Woldemar Cowan

“ As we have already seen with “balsoi” in Section 5, the interpretation of lujvo is constrained by the semantics of gismu and of their sumti places. Now, any asymmetrical lujvo with “gasnu” as its tertau will involve an event abstraction either implicitly or explicitly, since that is how the g2 place of “gasnu” is defined.
Therefore, if we assume that “nu” is the type of abstraction one would expect to be a “se gasnu”, then the rafsi “nun” and “kez” in “nunctikezgau” are only telling us what we would already have guessed — that the seltau of a “gasnu” lujvo is an event. ”

“ If the lujvo we want to modify with SE has a seltau already starting with a SE rafsi, we can take a shortcut. For instance, “gekmau” means “happier than”, while “selgekmau” means “making people happier than, more enjoyable than, more of a ’se gleki’ than”. If something is less enjoyable than something else, we can say it is “se selgekmau”.
But we can also say it is “selselgekmau”. Two “se” cmavo in a row cancel each other (“se se gleki” means the same as just “gleki”) , so there would be no good reason to have “selsel” in a lujvo with that meaning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All animal and plant gismu have such an x2 place; although there is in fact only one species of lion, and breeds of lion, though they exist, aren’t all that important in talking about lions. The species/breed place must exist for such diversified species as dogs, and for general terms like “cinki” (insect) , and are provided for all other animals and plants as a matter of regularity.
Less can be said about gismu place structure ordering, but some regularities are apparent. The places tend to appear in decreasing order of psychological saliency or importance. ”

“ This may not always be the case, and Lojbanists should be aware of the risk of ambiguity.
Eliding SE rafsi from tertau Eliding SE rafsi from tertau gets us into much more trouble. To understand why, recall that lujvo, following their veljvo, describe some type of whatever their tertau describe. Thus, “posydji” describes a type of “djica”, “gerzda” describes a type of “zdani”, and so on. What is certain is that “gerzda” does not describe a “se zdani” — it is not a word that could be used to describe an inhabitant such as a dog. ”

“ It is important to realize that such comparative lujvo do not presuppose their seltau. Just as in English, saying someone is younger than someone else doesn’t imply that they’re young in the first place: an octogenarian, after all, is still younger than a nonagenarian. ”

“ The English slang meanings of “do someone”, namely “socialize with someone” and “have sex with someone”, are not relevant to “gasnu”.)
So we can simply use “ctigau” with the same place structure as “nunctikezgau”:
13.5) agent g1 causes c1 to eat c2 g1 feeds c2 to c1. This particular kind of asymmetrical lujvo, in which the seltau serves as the selbri of an abstraction which is a place of the tertau, is called an implicit-abstraction lujvo, because one deduces the presence of an abstraction which is unexpressed (implicit) . ”

“ The component place structures are:
14.7) “xance”: xa1 is the hand of xa2 “minde”: m1 gives commands to m2 to cause m3 to happen The relation between the seltau and tertau is close enough for there to be an overlap: xa2 (the person with the hand) is the same as m1 (the one who commands) . But interpreting “xanmi'e” as a symmetrical lujvo with an elided “sel-” in the seltau, as if from “se xance minde”, misses the point: the real relation expressed by the lujvo is not just “one who commands and has a hand”, but “to command using the hand”. ”

“ So the veljvo is somewhat elliptical.
As a result, both “seljdasku” and “jdaselsku” belong to the second class of anomalous lujvo: the veljvo doesn’t really supply all that the lujvo requires.
Another example of this kind of anomalous lujvo, drawn from the tanru lists in Chapter 5, is “lange'u”, meaning “sheepdog”. Clearly a sheepdog is not a dog which is a sheep (the symmetrical interpretation is wrong) , nor a dog of the sheep breed (the asymmetrical interpretation is wrong) . Indeed, there is simply no overlap in the places of “lanme” and “gerku” at all. ”

“ This is because lujvo-making, paralleling natural language compounding, picks out the most salient relationship r between a tertau place and a seltau place to be expressed in a single word. The relationship “dog chases cat owned by daughter of person living in house” is too distant, and too incidental, to be likely to need expression as a single short word; the relationship “dog lives in house” is not. ”

“ If we drop these rafsi out, and use instead the shorter lujvo “ctigau”, rejecting its symmetrical interpretation (“someone who both does and eats”; “an eating doer”) , we can still deduce that the seltau refers to an event. ”

“ If the last place sounds unimportant to you, notice that what counts legally as a “sword”, rather than just a “knife”, depends on the length of the blade (the legal limit varies in different jurisdictions) . This fifth place of “cladakyxa'i” may not often be explicitly filled, but it is still useful on occasion. Because it is so seldom important, it is best that it be last.
Eliding SE rafsi from seltau It is common to form lujvo that omit the rafsi based on cmavo of selma'o SE, as well as other cmavo rafsi. Doing so makes lujvo construction for common or useful constructions shorter. ”

“ This is a prayer to Dong We could resolve such problems on a case-by-case basis for each lujvo (Section 14 discusses when this is actually necessary) , but case-by-case resolution for run-of-the-mill lujvo makes the task of learning lujvo place structures unmanageable. People need consistent patterns to make sense of what they learn. Such patterns can be found across gismu place structures (see Section 16) , and are even more necessary in lujvo place structures. Case-by-case consideration is still necessary; lujvo creation is a subtle art, after all. ”

“ Implicit-abstraction lujvo Eliding NU rafsi involves the same restrictions as eliding SE rafsi, plus additional ones. In general, NU rafsi should not be elided from the tertau, since that changes the kind of thing the lujvo is talking about from an abstraction to a concrete sumti. However, they may be elided from the seltau if no reasonable ambiguity would result. ”

“ Doubtless to the relief of the reader, here’s an illustration. We want to find out whether the White House (the one in which the U. S. President lives, that is) counts as a “gerku zdani”. We go through the five variables. The White House is the z1. ”