Classes of cmavo

[Colin Fine <colin@KINDNESS.DEMON.CO.UK>]

I've been trying to define some lojban grammatical terms in Lojban,
which is throwing up some very interesting questions (eg how can you
talk about what 'bridi' means without using 'bridi'). But a more general
question occurred to me.

The definition of 'cmavo' is

cmavo         ma'o structure word                            x1 is a
structure word of grammatical class x2, with meaning/function x3 in
usage (language) x4

In Lojban, cmavo are clearly distinguished by morphology from other
word-classes; but the definition has (not unreasonably) been extended
with an x4 place. So what might cmavo be in other languages?

At first sight it is pretty obvious - the cmavo of English are pronouns,
prepositions, conjunctions ... - but then it gets a bit harder. Adverbs?
Some. Auxiliaries and so on.

What I want to talk about is not actually what the cmavo are in another
language, but the fact that there seem to me to be two distinct classes
of cmavo in Lojban (but probably not in rarbau).

Zu'u there are what I choose to call cuvma'o (pure cmavo) which have no
intrinsic meaning, and are required (but often elidable) purely to make
the syntax work - ku, gi, cu, co, be are examples. Their selma'o are
singletons (because if there were more than one cmavo in the selma'o,
the choice would be semantic).

Zu'unai there are the selsmuma'o (meaning cmavo) which as well as
expressing structure also have meaning of their own - noticeable from
the fact that, unlike the cuvma'o, they are usually in selma'o of
several cmavo, that are grammatically interchangeable.

What is interesting about this classification, is that I have found it
quite hard to find a grammatical characterisation of selsmuma'o that
excludes brivla! It seems to me that, while cuvma'o are clearly a
different kind of animal from selsmuma'o and brivla, on both structural
and semantic grounds it is difficult to distinguish the class of brivla
from any other selma'o - except that it happens to be much larger.

pe'ipei mi'e kolin
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|     Colin Fine    66 High Ash, Shipley, W Yorks. BD18 1NE, UK       |
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