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Eliding SE rafsi from seltau |
Dog House And White House: Determining lujvo Place Structures
The Lojban Reference Grammar |
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Eliding KE and KEhE rafsi from lujvo |
Eliding SE rafsi from tertau gets us into much more trouble. To understand why, recall that lujvo, following their veljvo, describe some type of whatever their tertau describe. Thus, ``posydji'' describes a type of ``djica'', ``gerzda'' describes a type of ``zdani'', and so on. What is certain is that ``gerzda'' does not describe a ``se zdani'' --- it is not a word that could be used to describe an inhabitant such as a dog.
Now consider how we would translate the word ``blue-eyed''. Let's tentatively translate this word as ``blakanla'' (from ``blanu kanla'', meaning ``blue eye''). But immediately we are in trouble: we cannot say
10.1) la djak. cu blakanla
Jack is-a-blue-eye
because Jack is not an eye, ``kanla'', but someone with an eye,
``se kanla''. At best we can say
10.2) la djak. cu se blakanla
Jack is-the-bearer-of-blue-eyes
But look now at the place structure of ``blakanla'': it is a symmetrical lujvo, so the place structure is:
10.3) xe1=s1 is a blue eye of xe2=s2
We end up being most interested in talking about the second place, not the first (we talk much more of people than of their eyes), so ``se'' would almost always be required.
What is happening here is that we are translating the tertau wrongly, under the influence of English. The English suffix ``-eyed'' does not mean ``eye'', but someone with an eye, which is ``selkanla''.
Because we've got the wrong tertau (eliding a ``se'' that really should be there), any attempt to accommodate the resulting lujvo into our guidelines for place structure is fitting a square peg in a round hole. Since they can be so misleading, lujvo with SE rafsi elided from the tertau should be avoided in favor of their more explicit counterparts: in this case, ``blaselkanla''.
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Previous
Eliding SE rafsi from seltau |
Dog House And White House: Determining lujvo Place Structures
The Lojban Reference Grammar |
Next
Eliding KE and KEhE rafsi from lujvo |