expanding rafsi

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!BRADFORD.AC.UK!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>]

A little speculation that occurred to me while walking home the other
day:

How do you use a brivla when you can only remember the rafsi?

I practice my lojban as I walk, by saying things - often little sentences
of the form "ta broda". The other day I saw some grass.
Now I recall from recently reading The Open Window that "lawn" was
"saurfoi", and that "sau" was glossed as "grass", but I've never looked
to see what the full form is. So what do I do?

I started with
        "ta se rafsi zo rau"
Unfortunately the thing I was mentally pointing at was some growing
vegetable matter, not a linguistic object. In order to improve that you
seem to need
        "ta mela'elo se rafsi be zo rau"
which I think does the job, but is rather long-winded.
[I guess you could be even more precise with something like "terbridi"
rather than "me"].

Note that the "se rafsi" is needed - otherwise you would be (assumed to
be?) talking about the WORD "rau" not the RAFSI - and I'm not entirely
happy about how this distinction creeps in. Is it purely pragmatic, so
that "lo se rafsi zo rau" is actually ambiguous but rules out one
meaning ("the brivla whose rafsi is the CMAVO rau") simply because it is
nonsense?

Another approach, which I suspect is the preferable one for
conversation, is to say, this is a rafsi, so let's make a lujvo. But
what with?
        ta saurselrafsi - that is a grass kind of thing-with-rafsi?
        ta selrafsysau - that is a thing-with-rafsi kind of grass?
Neither of these does the job. The silly thing is that in any lujvo
whatever, "rau" will mean what I want it to mean - but I have to pick a
suitable brivla to combine it with, if I can think of one - and my
listener will probably try to attach meaning to my having used a lujvo
rather than the gismu.

What I want is a non-specific rafsi (it has to be a rafsi, not a cmavo,
so I can't use do'e [I think that's the non-specific pro-brivla isn't it?]),
so that I can turn any rafsi into a lujvo with meaning identical to its
corresponding gismu. I guess I could use "saurbroda", but unless we
establish this usage, that is likely to confuse.

[I can imagine people objecting that you won't know the place structure
- I propose to define the place structure of the lujvo as that of the
gismu. It may be that if you can't remember the gismu then you can't
remember the place structure, but it doesn't necessarily follow: in the
case in point I don't know the place structure for "grass", but I'm damn
sure the first place is the grass, and I guess that the second is the
species.]


                        kolin


ps: Point about posting. I realise that I have been wanting to use (and
show off) my lojban by writing more and more of my postings in lojban.
Looking back over some of my correspondence [eg when I strongly agreed
with And and he thought I was making fun of him] I realise that this is
not a good habit when there are (we hope) new people coming onto the
net. I undertake not to express anything important in my postings in lojban
without providing a translation - though I may continue to add
UI/attitudinals and parenthesised comments in lojban to the English
text.

                        Kolin
                                        c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk