| Lojban For Beginners — velcli befi la lojban. bei loi co'a cilre | ||
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| Prev | Chapter 14. Why didn't I think of that before? More connectives | Next |
The default grouping in Lojban is leftwards. This means that, if you have three things connected together in Lojban, the first two go together before you join in the third. For example, la djiotis. .e la suzyn. .onai la ranjit means not "Jyoti and either Susan or Ranjeet", but "Either Jyoti and Susan, or Ranjeet."
Does the distinction matter? Depends on your background; programmers, for example, are often driven to distraction in making sure their logical connectives work out in the right order (usually by copious use of brackets.) But there is often a real difference in meaning; the first interpretation given above describes a couple, for example, but the second doesn't.
The grouping of terms in Lojban grammar is particularly important when it comes to tanru. The way gismu group together in a tanru determines what that tanru means. For example,
has in English two interpretations: a bad magazine about music, or a magazine about bad music. In Lojban, its equivalentbad music magazine
has only the interpretation 'magazine about bad music', because the first two gismu (xlali zgike 'bad music') group together first. So it is important to be able to modify the grouping of gismu, so that we can make sure the tanru means what we actually intend it to mean. For that reason, Lojban has a couple of mechanisms in place for making tanru group together properly.xlali zgike karni
If you are a programmer, or a mathematician, you have long ago made brackets your trusted aide in dealing with this kind of problem. So you won't be surprised to hear that Lojban has cmavo that act as parentheses, grouping gismu together. Those cmavo are not to and toi: those are reserved for your own parenthetical comments, and you never know when you might want to insert a snide remark in the middle of a particularly arduous tanru. Rather, the cmavo you need are ke, to open the grouping bracket, and ke'e, to close it. So if xlali zgike karni means a {bad music} magazine, then a bad {music magazine} is in Lojban:
xlali ke zgike karni ke'e
Now, ke'e is a terminator, like all the other terminators we've seen: ku, kei, ku'o, vau, and so on. And like those terminators, it can be dropped out when no ambiguity will result. So if we know we're at the end of the tanru, having reached the end of the selbri (because we've just bumped into a sumti, say, or a new sentence), then we also know that any open ke brackets must now close; so ke'e can be omitted. This means you won't necessarily see a ke'e 'close bracket' after each ke 'open bracket':
.i mi pu zi te vecnu lo xlali ke zgike karni .i to'e zanru la'o gy. Eurythmics gy.
I just bought a bad {music magazine [}]. It dissed the Eurythmics.
That's one way of grouping together gismu in tanru. The other way is to use a cmavo we've already seen in a related role: bo. When bo appears between two gismu, it means that those gismu group together more tightly than anything else. So an alternative way of saying bad {music magazine} is
This means that zgike bo karni should count as a unit, to which the description xlali 'bad' applies.xlali zgike bo karni
bo does the same job with sentences (.i bo, .i ba bo, .i seni'i bo all attach to only the preceding sentence), with connectives (.e bo, gi'e bo), and so on. So if I want to say "Jyoti and either Susan or Ranjeet", I would say
For that matter, ke can also be used with connectives (though not with sentences; they have their own kind of bracket, tu'e–tu'u.) So I could also sayla djiotis. .e la suzyn. .onaibo la ranjit.
— where in most cases the ke'e may be left out.la djiotis. .e ke la suzyn. .onai la ranjit. ke'e
Tip: You can't start a run of sumti with ke, for reasons of Lojban grammatical pedantry we won't go into here.
Tip: An advantage of putting the connective before the two terms, or after the two terms, is that you can completely avoid this kind of ambiguity. The more geeky among you will have heard of Reverse Polish notation: this does arithmetic by placing the operators after the numbers they operate on (e.g. (2 + 3) × 5 becomes 2 3 + 5 ×), and so avoids having to use brackets. The same holds for Lojban forethought connectives: "Jyoti and either Susan or Ranjeet" is
and "Either Jyoti and Susan, or Ranjeet" isge la djiotis. gi gonai la suzyn. gi la ranjit.
Since there is no ambiguity, you won't need bo or ke with forethought connectives.gonai ge la djiotis. gi la suzyn. gi la ranjit.
| Exercise 3 |
Gloss the following into English, using brackets to indicate their structure. For instance:
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