Re: birthday? re.

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Metalinguistic expression on the current expression is handled explicitly
using the "sei" construct, which is preferred to parentheses, which are
also possible if less explicitly metalinguistic.

Lojban will tend to have words that are longer than their natlang
equivalents, since your are limited to one meaning per word, and must
thus expand the wordspace lengthwise to cram in the full range of natlang
meanings.  In this case, there is 'birthday', the day you were born,
'birthday', the anniversaries thereof, and 'birthday', the celebration,
annual or otherwise thereof (a friend of mine used to ignore birthdays and
celebrate thousand-days, and then there are always people born on leap
days, or who celebrate on a day other than the anniversary for convenience).

My lujvo would actually have a place structure something like
x1 celebrates birthday of x2 on date x3.
The concept 'birthday', as a noun, would then be longer since you must
abstract it with "nu" the get the celebration, or convert it with "te" to
get the date of the celebration (hmm, that's another split in meanings of
'birthday'), and then tag it with "le" to make it noun-like in grammar.

So yes, the Lojban is longer than 3 syllables, but is a lot clearer as to
what you are talking about in using the word.

lojbab