Re: Lojban Names.

[John Cowan <cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan>]

la kolin. fain. cusku di'e

> Actually, "lai" and "doi" are forbitten as well as "la", and for the
> same reason - the cmavo may precede the cmene directly. I would have
> thought this would apply to "la'i" as well, but I've never seen any such
> suggestion.

Since "la" is forbidden, "la'i" is forbidden >a fortiori< -- as are "la'a",
"la'e", "la'o", and "la'u", although none of those cmavo can directly
precede names.

> > On a totally different topic, could someone please explain what "cleft
> > places" are.  By not understanding this term, I seem to be missing out on
> > some interesting discussions.
>
> I've only picked this up from examples, but it seems to be cases where a
> place of a gismu was an actor/patient and another an event/action, and
> the person was usually the actor in the event, eg
>         I want him to do
> as opposed to
>         I want [the event that he do]
> which is not cleft.

Essentially correct.  The paradigm case is:

        x1 modifies x2 into x3 by doing/being x4 (cleft)

where the actor within the abstraction which goes in the x4 place is typically
the same as the overall actor in the x1 place.  The uncleft version is:

        event x1 modifies x2 into x3 (uncleft)

and this is now standard.  A major place-structure review was recently
comnpleted, which resulted in unclefting many place structures and clarifying
or rewriting others.  Some gismu were left explicitly cleft.  Bob will be
posting the result of this as soon as he has it all typed in.

--
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban