Re: Simple Lojban questions

[John Cowan <cowan@DRV.CBC.COM>]

la xorxes. cusku di'e

> In fact, the most difficult one would be to translate "my then wife".
> For example, how would we say: "I gave the cat to my then wife"?
> Now that I think about it, I don't know whether in {mi pu dunda
> le maltu le mi ca speni} ca means at the time of speaking or at the
> time of the giving.

The latter.  Tenses in subordinate bridi (and a description is
essentially a condensed form of subordinate bridi) are relative
to the tense in the main bridi.

To capture "my present wife" you would use "le mi nau speni";
"nau" always means "here and now" un-relatively.

> >Also, as I understand it, "sampli" has a definite
> >meaning, unlike the ambiguous "skami pilno".  Are such lujvo always
> >unambiguous, or are they only unambiguous when they happen to be
> >specifically defined in the dictionary?
>
> They will be unambiguous once they've had enough usage that we can
> determine their meaning. For the time being we can say that the speaker
> intended it to have an unambiguous meaning. If it catches on, that's what
> it will end up meaning.

Well put!

> > However, if I begin
> >typing a lot of Lojban in the future, the Dvorak style may not be
> >optimum; after all, Dvorak designed his layout to be optimal for the
> >English language.
>
> You must be joking.

Indeed.  However, Dvorak is probably as good or better for Lojban
than for English: it puts the vowels on the home-row, and Lojban
is more vowel-rich than English.  Qwerty is only suitable for
typing slowly.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban