| Lojban For Beginners — velcli befi la lojban. bei loi co'a cilre | ||
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With conversion and se, you have a new and powerful tool to use in your Lojban. But you might still find lenu mi klama cu se tcika la daucac. too long and clumsy. In that case, get ready for more Lojban tricks.
It would be really nice if klama had a place for the time of going/coming, but it doesn't. (After all, you wouldn't really want to have to learn a six-place selbri!) To get round this problem of missing places in selbri, Lojban has a series of cmavo (structure words) which add extra places to the selbri. The one we want here is ti'u, meaning 'occurring at the time of day...'. So we can now say
klama now expresses a relationship between six things: a goer, a destination, a source, a route, a vehicle, and a time at which this all takes place.mi klama ti'u la daucac.
I am going at 10:00
So why, you may ask, didn't I just say that in the first place? I could have done, but then you wouldn't have found out about nu and se! There is more to this lesson than meets the eye.
Note: Different types of cmavo belong to different classes (se cmavo or selma'o). For example, all articles (apart from those specific to cmene, like la) belong to the same class, and all of them can appear in the same place in a sentence. This selma'o is called LE, after the most widely used cmavo in the class, le. Likewise, the cmavo that introduce new sumti into a bridi belong to the class BAI — so named from bai, the cmavo meaning 'forced by'. (This type of cmavo is also called sumti tcita 'sumti labels'.) We will be seeing more of these cmavo in the lessons ahead.