25. Explicit magnitudes

It is a limitation of the VA and ZI system of specifying magnitudes that they can only prescribe vague magnitudes: small, medium, or large. In order to express both an origin point and an exact distance, the Lojban construction called a ``termset'' is employed. (Termsets are explained further in Chapter 14 and Chapter 16.) It is grammatical for a termset to be placed after a tense or modal tag rather than a sumti, which allows both the origin of the imaginary journey and its distance to be specified. Here is an example:

25.1)    la frank. sanli zu'a nu'i la djordj.
        lu'a lo mitre
            be li mu [nu'u]
    Frank stands [left] [start termset] George
        [quantity] a thing-measuring-in-meters
            the-number 5 [end termset].
    Frank is standing five meters to the left of George.

Here the termset extends from the ``nu'i'' to the implicit ``nu'u'' at the end of the sentence, and includes the terms ``la djordj.'', which is the unmarked origin point, and the tagged sumti ``lo mitre be li mu'', which the cmavo ``la'u'' (of selma'o BAI, and meaning ``with quantity''; see Chapter 9) marks as a quantity. Both terms are governed by the tag ``zu'a''

It is not necessary to have both an origin point and an explicit magnitude: a termset may have only a single term in it. A less precise version of Example 25.1 is:

25.2)    la frank. sanli zu'a nu'i lu'a
        lo mitre be li mu
    Frank stands [left] [termset] [quantity]
        a thing-measuring-in-meters the-number 5.
    Frank stands five meters to the left.