Let's look at a simple Lojban bridi. The place structure of the gismu tavla is
where the “x” es with following numbers represent the various arguments that could be inserted at the given positions in the English sentence. For example:
has “John” in the x1 place, “Sam” in the x2 place, “engineering” in the x3 place, and “Lojban” in the x4 place, and could be paraphrased:
Talking is going on, with speaker John and listener Sam and subject matter engineering and language Lojban.
The Lojban bridi corresponding to Example 2.7 will have the form
The word cu serves as a separator between any preceding sumti and the selbri. It can often be omitted, as in the following examples.
(Example 2.13 is a bit unusual, as there is no easy way to point to a language; one might point to a copy of this book, and hope the meaning gets across!)
When there are one or more occurrences of the cmavo zo'e at the end of a bridi, they may be omitted, a process called “ellipsis”. Example 2.11 and Example 2.12 may be expressed thus:
Note that Example 2.13 is not subject to ellipsis by this direct method, as the zo'e in it is not at the end of the bridi.