| Lojban For Beginners — velcli befi la lojban. bei loi co'a cilre | ||
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| Prev | Chapter 7. Getting Personal: Pro-sumti and more abstractions | Next |
You may have noticed two other new words in the previous Lojban sentence. lu and li'u are like 'quote' and 'unquote' — they put something someone says into a sumti. li'u is one of the few terminators that can almost never be missed out, since that would make everything else that follows part of the quotation. You can also nest quotations, e.g.
which is similar tola ranjit. pu cusku lu la djiotis. pu cusku lu coi li'u mi li'u
Ranjeet said "Jyoti said 'Hello' to me."
la ranjit. pu cusku lu la djiotis. pu rinsa mi li'u
Ranjeet said "Jyoti greeted me."
Being a logical language, Lojban is very careful to distinguish between words for things, and the things themselves. So you can't speak about the phrase le munje 'the universe' in the same way you speak about the universe itself. To give a silly example, the phrase le munje is small, but the universe itself is not. To distinguish between the two in Lojban, you need to use quotation:
lu le munje li'u cu cmalu
'The universe' is small
le munje na cmalu
The universe is not small
Tip: lu... li'u is intended to quote grammatical pieces of Lojban — ideally, entire sentences, rather than individual words. For smaller chunks of Lojban, which do not necessary make sense in isolation, the proper quotation words are instead lo'u... le'u, the 'error quotes'. For example, ro le mi pendo cu klama makes sense in Lojban as a sentence, and can be enclosed in lu... li'u. But if you want to say what goes before pendo in the sentence, ro le mi does not make that much sense on its own. So you would quote that sentence fragment, not as lu ro le mi li'u, but as lo'u ro le mi le'u.
Vocabulary
fengu x1 is angry/mad at x2 for x3 (action/state/property)
| Exercise 3 |
Translate the following. Continue to assume the same values for ko'a/e/i that we have been using so far.
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