| Lojban For Beginners — velcli befi la lojban. bei loi co'a cilre | ||
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| Prev | Chapter 10. Cause and Effect | Next |
Let's revisit that piece of logic we were ruminating on earlier:
We've seen how .i shows that a new sentence is starting; but we can also tag things onto the .i. We've seen (in passing) that two sumti can be joined with .e. In the same way, .ije joins two sentences with a logical AND, i.e. it asserts that both sentences are true. Normally we don't need to do this, since we usually assume that what we say is true; but it is useful here, because it binds the first two sentences together, so that when the 'conclusion' sentence comes, it 'therefores' both of them, not just the second. (This is called 'left-grouping' and there are ways to override it, which we'll come back to.)la flufis. ractu .ije ro ractu na'e ze'u jmive .i la flufis. ni'i na ze'u jmive
Note: Again, this sentence misses out a number of logical steps, including the fact that Fluffy is a rabbit and that he had lived out his rabbit life naturally, rather than getting eaten by a dog — but you get the idea, I hope.
Now, lenu-abstractions can be treated as sentences: they contain complete bridi, after all. So we can also phrase these sentences as separate sentences, still using sumti tcita to connect them:
la flufis. mrobi'o ni'i lenu ro ractu na'e ze'u jmive
Fluffy died because rabbits don't live long.
la flufis. mrobi'o .i ni'ibo ro ractu na'e ze'u jmive
Fluffy died. That's because rabbits don't live long.
ro ractu na'e ze'u jmive seni'i lenu la flufis. mrobi'o
Rabbits don't live long, with the logical consequence that Fluffy died.
ro ractu na'e ze'u jmive .iseni'ibo la flufis. mrobi'o
Rabbits don't live long. Therefore, Fluffy died.
There's a new cmavo in the last example, bo. Why? Well, a sumti tcita can indeed be used to connect sentences to other sentences, just as it is used to connect sumti into bridi (though there are only so many sumti tcita this makes sense for — and this lesson contains most of them.) However, left on its own, a sumti tcita always applies to the sumti after it. So had I just said
that would have meant something like "With the logical result of Fluffy, [something] dies." I'm not quite sure what this means; maybe the 'something' is some mythical creature that spontaneously generates bunny rabbits as it expires. But of course, this doesn't mean what we want. To make the sumti tcita apply to the entire sentence, we follow it with the word bo..iseni'i la flufis. mrobi'o
Tip: This applies to other kind of sumti tcita, by the way, like tense words. For example, .i ba bo means 'afterwards, then': the sentence after .i ba bo refers to something that took place later than what took place in the sentence before .i ba bo.
Note: The very astute reader will have noted that 'afterwards' should have been .i pu bo; the analogy with ba ku won out, though. (See The Complete Lojban Language, Chapter 10.12.) The rest of you may ponder what on Earth I'm talking about, but need not lose sleep over it.
Vocabulary
| Exercise 3 |
Where necessary, insert any of je, seni'ibo, babo, seri'abo after all but the first .i in each of the following text fragments. For example: .i mi telgau fi le vorme .i seni'ibo le vorme cu te telgau fi mi
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