Complex sumti

More le selbri [ku] descriptions

Now that we have seen a variety of selbri forms, it may become obvious that any of these selbri structures can be used in description sumti marked with le. Indeed, some of these structures, especially internal sumti and abstractions, are much more commonly found embedded in sumti, than in the selbri defining the main relation of the sentence.

Now for a tricky usage. We use go'i to refer to the bridi of the last sentence. Therefore le go'i [ku] refers to the first place of that bridi (in this case, the go-er, do). If we want to refer to the second place of the last sentence bridi, the destination, we can mentally convert that sentence using se: so le se go'i [ku] means the destination (le se klama [ku] = le se tavla [ku]).

It is important to remember and correctly use the elidable separator cu with description selbri. If you misplace it or omit it (or its less-often used alternative ku), you will create some very strange tanru.

sumti descriptions with internal sumti

The phrase

A selbri can consist of a tanru with internal sumti; therefore a sumti may be built on such a selbri, possibly even having internal sumti on both components of a tanru . (In a tanru embedded within a sumti, even the sumti attached to the final component must be attached with be/bei/be'o):

Abstraction sumti clauses

Abstraction sumti clauses take the form "le nu sentence kei":

In addition, the mi inside the abstraction will often be omitted. When a listener hears this sentence and realizes that the go-er wasn't specified, the obvious value(s) will be assumed (as with the origin, the route and the means). Leaving out the mi is exactly comparable to the difference between the two English sentences:

I want to go to the store (and) I want myself to go to the store.

mi djica lenu klama le zarci
I want to go to the store.

If an abstraction is in the x₁ position, cu allows four other elidable markers to be omitted. An example is the following conversion of the last example sentence:

We promised to give examples of two of the other types of abstractions in this section. These abstractions tend to be associated with specific places of particular brivla.

Quantified sumti ("le number [boi] selbri [ku]")

One way to quantify a sumti being described is to insert the number followed by a terminator boi, which may be omitted when no ambiguity results (the usual case):

boi may not be elided when a number selbri follows, since you wouldn't know otherwise where one number stops and the next begins (Lojban does not allow such boundaries to be expressed by contrastive stress as in English):

Quantified selection from sumti ("number [boi] le [number] [boi] selbri [ku]")

You can also put a number preceding the le, to select from the set of individuals indicated by the description:

Indefinite description sumti ("lo selbri [ku]")

If you wish to describe a sumti, but do not have a specific instance of the sumti in mind, you can instead refer generically to something that meets the terms of the description selbri:

Lojban allows you to omit the lo in:

number [boi] [lo] [number [boi] ] selbri [ku]

di'u and la'e di'u

In English, if I say The school is beautiful, you might reply This pleases me. How do you know what this refers to? Lojban uses different expressions to convey the possible meanings of English this. So, given the sentence:

Other sumti types

Lojban supports several other sumti types, more than we can discuss in a short paper. These include bare numbers, and several kinds of quoted text (single words, grammatical text, potentially ungrammatical text, and non-Lojban text).