Re: Simple Lojban questions

["John E. Clifford" <Pycyn@AOL.COM>]

My wife before she was.  _le_ selects on the basis of your intended
reference, regardless of whether the predication fits, so using it to refer
to someone in the past who later became works perfectly well.  Or use _lo_
(predicate does fit) but tense it for future (-but-not-at-reference-point).

Selbri-first sentences have a special use in Lojban (observatives, I think,
"Hey look at...).  However, the effect you want can be achieved by putting
any of a number cmavo (tense, e.g., or attitudinals or...) in first and then
going on.  "Normal" SVO order seems the best compromise (to me, a speaker of
a language where it really is normal) and SOV seems hard, yet many languages
manage (even German according to a whole series of jokes about waiting for
the verb).

As we keep saying, ambiguity freedom in Lojban is *syntactic* ambiguity only,
semantic ambiguity is useful for many pruposes, even simple conversation. So
_skami pilno_ means "computer user" pretty much the same range of
ambiguities.  This can be disambiguated in a variety of ways if need be
(putting an "and" between to show that the subject is both or putting the
"computer" part explicitly in second position, for example -- other moves are
possible).  Lujvo are unambiguous when they are introduced, even before they
enter any dictionary -- the coiner has the responsibility for defining the
full structure.  Some attempts have been made to regularize this process, but
little of this effort has been generally accepted.

Nuclear words.  Yes and yes, but don't ask me what they are, right off the
top of my head (or maybe some have not yet been created).

Metric words - yes, a full set.

Letter count.  Something like this was done for the basic words -- gismu and
cmavo -- but nothing for running text, so far as I have seen.  Dvorak
keyboards will almost certainly not be particularly advantageous in Lojban.
 Nor much of a problem neither.