Re: self-descriptions?

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

Goran:
> > What I mean is: "is {dansu kansa coa kansa} a complex selbri"?
> > It seems to me that it should be.
> Nooo, that is not grammatical by itself. Imaginary journeys cmavo
> terminate the preceding sumti. For your excerpt, parser reports problems
> with selma'o BRIVLA; my sentence (at least, its relevant part) parses as
> ({le <dansu kansa>} {<co'a kansa> VAU})

That is bad. Contrast {ex young president} with {young ex president},
for instance.

> > > > > .i mi nunxeldraco kelci
> > Hmm. You need {mi ka fu xeu da draci kei kelci}, really. Or - worse -
> > {mi se xi pa nundraci kelci}. But I don't think your preferences
> > should be allowed to establish usage unchallenged, however fluent
> > that usage is.
> I am not very good at following your very technical conversations; I
> still am not too sure what the first would mean.

"I play at having the property of being an actor".

> ji'a I don't understand the second, either. Why sexipa? Isn't that the
> same as {mi nundraci kelci}?

I thought {se xi pa} gives the x6 place. x6 of {nundraci} is the actor.

> > > > coo, mie noi friko ninmu tordu marksista kuo and
> > > ??? And the African-womanly short Marxist ??? ki'acai?
> > fi la pou lojbab ralju fe lei jai fau skicu be fo lo jbovla bei fe
> > maa bei fai ro da poi kea me maa bei fi da fa diu tinbe
> Rule made by the Chief the lojbab
> (rule) which is the event of describing
>  with description: lojbanic words
>  about us
>  everybody of us
>  to somebody
>  that this describes
> =The rule made by Chief lojbab about all of us describing us to others in
> lojban with these words is obeyed.
> I spent 5 to 10 minutes translating this jufra! What an obfuscation!

Well done, then. Why did you find it difficult? It's in an unfamiliar
style, but there isn't lots of deep subordination and tons of terminators
and stuff. Note too that I couldn't write and English or Serbocroat
sentence of that length that would take you so long to puzzle out.
This shows how limited our command of the language still is.

---
And