le'avla

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

Nick Nicholas comments:
>la banresperanto. nik.  (should that be ban,repseranto?  I keep
>wondering how to distinguish le'avla from lujvo.) is turning out to be
>making more trouble in Lojbanland (jbonat) than he first suspected.
>Vicious me.  I'll say something about the translations of La Espero and
>le se vaiciska be le lojbab ku (is that anything *near* "Bob's
>masterpiece"?) later.

I stay away from teaching le'avla early, Nick.  I want people to get
used to lujvo - which is the preferred way for Lojban.  But you may be
correct in needing a le'avla for 'Esperanto', and the first one works
fine.

How can you tell?  First, the 'ba' can't fall off, since a word can't
start with 'nr'.  Second, it doesn't break up into rafsi.  First there
are no 'y' hyphens (a le'avla can't ever have them) - this means any
rafsi except the final one must be 3 letters long, and the last either 3
or it must be a proper gismu form (it is considered a bad le'avla if it
is a good gismu form CCVCV or CVCCV, even if the 'gismu' doesn't mean
anything; likewise if the rafsi are meaningless - the form is the thing.
Starting from the left gives ban-res-per-anto and the 'anto' isn't a
legal rafsi or gismu form so the word is a borrowing.  (This is the
REASON why.  It turns out that certain algorithms always generate good
le'avla, so you don't have to perform this analysis each time, but its
nice to be able to check.)  Your second try is also good, but looks ugly
and mangles the borrowed word unnecessarily.

(but did you consider borrowing the Esp-o metaphor 'pa'arbau'/
'pacnybangu' (hoper-language) 'la pa'arbau' is 'that called
Hoper-Language' and 'le' as a prefix is a descriptor 'that which I
describe as hoper-language'; even lo works, though since lo pa'arbau =
that which really is a hoper-language since Esperantists do hope - that
their language becomes a world language).

Now for the bad news.

'la' takes either a name, or it turns a description into a name.  You
can't mix both.  '*la banresperanto. nik.' would probably be taken by a
fluent listener to be naming Esperanto, and then addressing Nick, but
incorrectly forgetting the vocative 'doi' (there have been occasional
proposals to allow the 'doi' to be dropped in just these cases, but it
turns out to be difficult to define for teaching purposes as well as
parsing purposes just when the morphology allows this (you are mixing
morphology and syntax rules, which we try to avoid to keep things
simple).  So we insist on 'doi'.  This is a difference from Jim Brown's
Loglan, that allows the vocative marker to be dropped when there is no
confusion.

Assuming you want to call yourself 'Esperanto Nick', you need to make
both names: 'la .esperanton. nik. or even la .esperantonik.  Or you
can use a relative phrase:  la nik pe la/le banresperanto/pa'arbau

We call Lojban-country 'Lojbanistan' - sounds more exotic and
non-English.  Jim Brown called it the boring 'Loglandia'.  But 'natmi'
is the culture word for nation/ethnos of people - no territory involved,
so you wouldn't call it Lojbanistan.  We usually use the usage with
American Indians - perhaps you also talk about the aboriginal nation.
In the news now is the Kurdish nation, and the Shiite nation, the former
has a theoretical territory that we call Kurdistan; the latter does not
since the Shiites are more dispersed.  Thus we use 'gugde' for country,
or 'tutra' for territory.  We might call any '-istan' a gugde; if it is
recognized and has a government (as the Kurds want, whether autonomous
or not), it is a jecta.  The Shiites can claim 'tutra' though,
especially their holy cities, which the Coalition bombers avoided as
'censa tutra = cestutra'.  There are a few other words in the
culture/nation/people/language cluster, and we've tried to maximally
divide them up to allow the fine distinctions that people often make -
yet NONE of our source languages had a separate word for each of our
concepts, and Hindi barely had more than one.

'jbonat' is a name and needs 'la' in front of it - 'jbonatmi' the predicate
word version can stand alone.

'*le se vaiciska be ...' has three problems.  The 'lojban' needs 'la',
as it is a name.  The lujvo needs an 'r' or the 'vai' falls off from a
lack of consonant cluster near the beginning.  This is what rates the
asterisk - correct is 'vairciska'.

The other problem is semantic - due to 'ciska's meaning, you have 'the
important-inscription by Bob (inscribed on x3, important to x4 in/for
x5).  I made no inscriptions - the keyword is only a memory hook and you
have to learn which is the correct English meaning of 'write', which is
what the place structure tells you - indeed, at this stage, this is the
most important function of place structures, to help us keep meanings
straight.

Neither of these though is a serious error for a novice on his first attempts
at the language.  You showed an uncommon mastery of the syntax, Nick.
Tell people how you did it, so they can learn the same way.

(I prefer "vaiselfinti" for your interpretation of 'masterpiece'.  The most
common meaning of 'masterpiece' might be "cetselfinti" or "cetselyla'u"
or possibly even a word using 'traji'.  Of course, if you mean the original
sense of the word, the work that proves one a master, try "cetcipselzba")

.i'ecai fi'idoi nik. poi ba'e lojbo

mi'e lojbab.