Lojban: The Logical Language

If you are new to Lojban or this site, please read the help page first.

Finding Lojbanic Information: [ Help | Resources | Popular Pages | Site Map | Search ]

Basic Information About Lojban: [ FAQ | About Lojban | General LLG Information | News ]

Learning Lojban: [ Just Starting Out | Experienced | LLG Publications | Texts In Lojban ]

Helping The Lojban Community: [ Projects | LLG Committees | How You Can Help | Give Feedback ]

Languages:

Lesson 7: Getting Personal: Pro-sumti

So far we've been referring to everybody by name, which can get very repetitive if you want to tell a story, or even string two sentences together. Consider the following:

la suzyn. klama le barja .i la suzyn ze'e pinxe loi vanju .i la suzyn. zgana lo nanmu .i le nanmu cu melbi .i caku le nanmu cu zgana la suzyn.: Susan goes to the bar. Susan drinks some wine for a while. Susan notices [sees, observes] a man. The man is beautiful. At that moment, the man notices Susan.

Note the use of melbi—in English we usually describe men as "handsome" rather than "beautiful", but this rather sexist distinction doesn't apply in Lojban. However, if you really wanted a Lojban word for "handsome" (beautiful-kind-of-man) I suppose you could say melnau (melbi + nanmu).

It is pretty tedious to have to keep repeating "Susan" and "man". English gets round this problem by using pronouns, like "she" or "he". This works OK in this case, because we have one female and one male in the story so far, but it can get confusing when more characters enter the scene (and it's even more confusing with languages that only have one word for "he", "she" and "it", like Turkish or spoken Chinese). Lojban has pro-sumti, which are like pronouns—sort of.

In fact, we've already met some pro-sumti: mi and do, and the ti/ta/tu group, but we still don't have he/she/it, which are a bit more complicated. One way of dealing with this is a group of cmavo which refer back to something we've just said. In fact we have met one of these in a different context: go'i. Just as go'i on its own repeats the previous bridi, le go'i repeats the first sumti of the previous bridi. So we can rewrite the first three sentences as

la suzyn. klama le barja .i le go'i ze'e pinxe loi vanju .i le go'i zgana lo nanmu

The system breaks down here, though, since nanmu is not in the first, but the second place of the previous bridi. English doesn't bother with precision here—"he" just means "some male person mentioned earlier." This works in the example here, because there is only one man in the story, but what about

Bill saw Rick. He hit him

Did Bill hit Rick, or did Rick hit Bill? We don't know.

Coming back to the man Susan saw, we can refer to him as ri, which means "the most recent sumti". So we can say

.i le go'i zgana lo nanmu .i ri melbi

ri is one of a series, ri/ra/ru, meaning "the most recent/fairly recent/distant sumti", but as far as I've noticed, ra and ru aren't very popular in Lojbanistan at the moment. ri, on the other hand, is used a lot, since it's very common for the last thing in one sentence to be the subject of the next sentence.

Another pro-sumti is da, which means "someone/something". You may remember zo'e, which means also means "something", but with zo'e the something is unimportant - it's just a way of filling a sumti place. da, on the other hand, is important—it is something or someone we are talking about.

Note for logicians: da is the "existential x", as in "There exists some x such that x is ..."

Coming back to our story, we could start by saying da klama le barja—"Someone came to the bar." da and its companions de and di are used a lot for talking about language - you see them frequently on the Lojban e-mail list, for example. By the way, there are no do and du in this series, because these already have other meanings: "you" and "is the same thing as".

Assigning pro-sumti

If we're telling a story in English, the meaning of, say, "she" keeps changing. At the moment, it means "Susan", but if Susan's friend Jyoti walks into the bar, "she" could very well mean "Jyoti". In Lojban, we can keep on using le go'i, ri and their relatives, but there is an easier way of dealing with a larger cast of characters.

What we do is assign pro-sumti as and when we need them, using the cmavo goi (which I am told is like the Latin word sive). The sumti assigned by goi are a series called KOhA, consisting of ko'a, ko'e, ko'i ... you get the idea?

Note for grammarians: series of cmavo (called selma'o in Lojban) are referred to by the name of a typical member written in capitals (with a small "h" instead of the apostrophe). For example, the attitudinals we looked at in Lesson 1 are part of selma'o .UI .

Note for lawyers (and frustrated non-lawyers): the equivalent in legal documents of goi is "henceforth referred to as," and ko'a is something like "the party of the first part". Lojban has in fact been proposed as the ideal language for law, where precision is of utmost importance. It would also allow non-lawyers to understand legal documents, which would be something of a miracle.

OK, let's go back to Susan's story. We start by saying

la suzyn. goi ko'a klama le barja

This means that from now on, every time we use ko'a, we mean "Susan". The man she sees can then be ko'e, so we say

.i ko'a zgana lo nanmu goi ko'e

Now every time we use ko'e it means that particular man, so the full story so far reads:

la suzyn. goi ko'a klama le barja .i ko'a ze'e pinxe loi vanju .i ko'a zgana lo nanmu goi ko'e .i ko'e melbi .i caku ko'e zgana ko'a

(note how the cus have disappeared— ko'a, like mi, doesn't need them).

Assigning ko'e to lo nanmu is actually better than starting the next sentence with le nanmu. This is because le nanmu simply means "the thing I have in mind which I call 'man'," which is not exactly the same as "the man" (it could, in theory, be something totally different). Some Lojbanists would even say that using le like this is a bit malglico.

Note: if you combine ko'a/e/i/o/u with ri/ra/ru, don't count ko'a-type pro-sumti when you're counting back. For example

la suzyn. rinsa ko'e .i ri cisma

doesn't mean that ko'e (the man, in this context) smiles, but that Susan smiles. This is because it is pointless to have a backwards-pointing (anaphoric) pro-sumti referring to a fixed pro-sumti like ko'e—it's simpler just to re-use ko'e and keep ri/ra/ru for more important things.

Let's continue by introducing Susan's friend Jyoti (if people are wondering where I get all these unusual names from, Jyoti is an old Gujarati friend of mine). We continue ....

caku la djiotis. goi ko'i mo'ine'i .i ko'i cusku lu coi ranjit. li'u ko'e

At that time, Jyoti henceforth third-thing-referred-to moving-inside. Third-thing-referred-to says "Hello Ranjeet" to second-thing-referred-to.

Just then Jyoti comes in and says "Hello, Ranjeet" to the guy. mo'ine'i is another space "tense". mo'i indicates movement; ne'i means "inside" (from the gismu, nenri). The selbri is missed out because the way Jyoti moves is not important (klama is possible, but unnecessary, but we could use bajra, for example). This is creative Lojban—it's not exactly ungrammatical to leave a selbri out like this, but it means that this is a sentence-fragment, not a bridi. Don't try this at home, kids.

lu, li'u, du'u and vo'a

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.

la ranjit. pu cusku lu la djiotis. pu cusku lu coi li'u mi li'u: Ranjeet said "Jyoti said "Hello" to me."

which is similar to

la ranjit. pu cusku lu la djiotis. pu rinsa mi li'u: Ranjeet said "Jyoti greeted me."

Both can also be expressed in a rather more subtle way:

la ranjit. pu cusku le du'u la djiotis. pu rinsa vo'a: Ranjeet past-express the-predicate Jyoti past-greet the-first-place OR Ranjeet said that Jyoti greeted him.

du'u is a tricky but very useful cmavo meaning, in logical terms, "the predicate". What this means in ordinary language is something like "the statement that X is true". Sorry, that wasn't really ordinary language. The closest equivalent in English is "that", as in "Ranjeet said that ...". Here's another example of du'u:

la suzyn. na djuno le du'u la jang. cinynei vo'a: Susan doesn't know that Zhang fancies ("sexually-likes") her.

And here we have another pro-sumti: vo'a. This means "the first sumti of this bridi", and like the others, comes in a series—vo'e refers to the second sumti, vo'i to the third and so on. In practice, vo'a is used quite a lot, while the others are rarer, but that could be because people still tend to think in terms of natural languages (notably English), and as people start thinking more in Lojban, the others could get used more.

vo'a is very useful to give the sense of "herself", "itself" and so on. For example

la meilis. pensi vo'a: Mei Li thinks about herself.
le gerku cu batci vo'a: The dog bites itself.

You can also say

mi nelci vo'a: I like myself.

but this is the same as mi nelci mi, which is simpler and more aesthetic.

Now for something clever.

la suzyn. zgani la djiotis. soi vo'a vo'e: Susan notices Jyoti and vice versa. OR Susan and Jyoti notice each other.

soi is a cmavo meaning something like "you can change these sumti round and the bridi will still be true". If there is only one sumti after the soi, the other one is taken to be the one immediately before soi. So we can say the same thing more briefly as la suzyn. zgani la djiotis. soi vo'a, or even just ko'a zgani ko'i soi vo'a (vo'a is fixed, and, unlike ri can point back to ko'a, though you can also repeat ko'a if you prefer).

Exercise 1

Translate the following. Assume the same values for ko'a/e/i that we have been using so far (i.e. ko'a is Susan, and so on).

Note: doi is used to show who you're talking to (without doi the cmene might become the first sumti of the bridi). It's a bit like English "O" (as in "O ye of little faith") or the Latin vocative (as in "Et tu, Brute").

.i ko'a ca cusku lu .ue coi li'u ko'i soi vo'a .i ko'a .e ko'i xanka cmila .i caku le go'i catlu ko'e .i ko'e cusku lu doi djiotis. le do pendo mo li'u .i ko'i cusku lu la suzyn. li'u .i ko'e cusku .ui lu lo do pendo du lo mi pendo li'u .i ko'i fengu catlu ko'e .i ko'a xunfirbi'o

Vocabulary: xanka—nervous, worried; catlu—look at [compare with zgani]; pendo—friend; fengu— angry; xunfirbi'o—blush [xunre (red) + flira (face) + binxo (become) ]

Some more personal pro-sumti

We've already seen two personal pro-sumti, mi and do, meaning "I" (or "me") and "you". However, "you" in English can mean four different things:

The one person I'm talking to.
A number of people I'm talking to.
The person or people I'm talking to and some other person or people.
Anyone (as in "Money can't buy you love.").

Lojban gets round the confusion between 1. and 2. by using numbers. The most common way to express 2. is rodo, "all of you" (or U.S. "Y'all") and, as we've seen, coi rodo is "Hello all"—a common way to start an e-mail to a list. You can also use specific numbers—redo would mean "the two of you" or "you two" (for example, I start e-mails to my parents with coi redo). You can also use numbers with doi e.g. rodoi ko klama ti.

3. is expressed by do'o—you and someone else, and 4. is completely different. It's normally expressed by roda or, more specifically ro le prenu, but often you can just miss it out altogether.

English "we" is almost as confusing, as it can mean the speaker and the listener(s), the speaker and some other people, or the speaker and the listener and some other people. Not surprisingly, Lojban has three pro-sumti for "we":

mi'o—you and I (but no-one else)
mi'a —I and another / others (but not you)
ma'a—you and I and another / others

Some examples:

mi prami do: I love you.
mi'a penmi do ti'u la cicac.: We'll meet you at three o'clock.
ma'a remna: We are all human.

Exercise 2

The story continues! For each of the pro-sumti in bold say who or what they mean. Just two other points: ka is like nu, but while nu describes a state or event, ka describes a property or quality. na'e is like na but only negates the selbri—it says that there is some relationship between the sumti other than that which the selbri describes. As we saw in Lesson 5, mi na nelci ro lo gerku means "It is not true that I like all dogs," (or "I don't like all dogs), while mi na'e nelci ro lo gerku is more like "I dislike all dogs."

ko'a mliburna .i ko'a mo'ini'a clatu le kabri .i caku ri simlu leka cinri ko'a .i ko'e cinba ko'i soi vo'a .i ko'i cusku lu pe'i redo puzi ninpe'i li'u .i le vanju cu simlu leka mutce cinri .i ko'a sutra pinxe le go'i .i ko'e cusku lu .yyy. na go'i .i mi'a puze'e na'e penmi li'u .i baziku ko'a cmila .i ko'a cusku lu .u'i redo bebna .i .e'u

ma'a klama lo dansydi'u

Vocabulary: mliburna—mildly embarrassed [milxe (mild) + burna (embarrassed) ]; ni'a—down, below (space "tense"); kabri—cup, glass; vanju—wine; simla—seem [x₁ seems to have property x₂ to observer x₃]; cinri—interesting; pe'i—"I think" (opinion attitudinal); ninpe'i—meet for the first time [cnino (new) + penmi (meet)]; .y.—"er" (hesitation); mutce—much, very; bebna—silly; .e'u—suggestion (attitudinal); dansydi'u— disco [dansu (dance) + dinju (building)].

Answers to Exercises

Exercise 1

Susan and Jyoti say "Oh! Hello!" to each other at the same time. They laugh nervously. At that moment, Jyoti looks at Ranjeet. He says "Who's your friend?" She says "Susan." He says "Delighted—any friend of yours is a friend of mine." She looks at him angrily. Susan blushes.

Note that in order to get this into understandable English, we've had to change some of the pro-sumti back into names. We could also make the translation sound more natural by changing the word order a bit more, changing "says" to "asks" when it's a question, and maybe putting the whole thing into the past tense. du here translates as "is", but don't use it for just any case of "is"—it is like the = sign in maths and can only be used for two expressions that describe the same thing. Using du to translate the "is" in, say, "Susan is a doctor" is extremely malglico. la suzyn. du lo mikce would mean that Susan is the same as each and every doctor (the correct Lojban would be simply la suzyn. mikce).

Exercise 2

ri = le kabri
vo'a = la ranjit. "Ranjeet and Jyoti kiss each other."
redo = la suzyn. .e la ranjit. "You two."
le go'i = le vanju "She drinks it quickly."
go'i = la suzyn. puzi ninpe'i la ranjit. soi vo'a Note that here go'i refers not to the previous sentence in the story, but to the previous sentence in the conversation. Obviously Susan wouldn't be talking about a story that hasn't been written yet!
ma'a = la suzyn. .e la ranjit. .e la djiotis. "Let's [all] go to the disco."

Very loose translation

Susan felt a bit embarrassed. She looked down at her glass. Just then, she found it very interesting. Ranjeet and Jyoti kissed each other. "I think you two have just met," she said. The wine was somehow incredibly interesting, and she drank it quickly. "Errr, no, we've never met," said Ranjeet. A little later, Susan laughed. "Come on, you're both being silly," she said, "Let's go to the disco."

Last modified: Mon Jun 27 23:11:17 PDT 2005

Please contact us with any comments, suggestions or concerns.