Re: TECH: query on zoi & laho terminators

[John Cowan <cowan@MAGPIE.LL.PBS.ORG>]

>
la kolin. cusku di'e

> > I believe the terminator is required to be a lojban word, and must
> > be set off from the text by lojban pause eather end. (Since
> > people usually use lerfu or names, the closing terminator
> > is normally followed by a pause too, but that's not part of
> > the rule).

la .and. cusku di'e

> My understanding is that zoi or laho is followed by any legal
> lojban syllable, & that this syllable acts as the terminator.
> I think I got this from John Cowan, & was so impressed at
> its ingenuity that I inceived it into my own language, discarding
> the previous method for dealing with the same problem.

Colin is right and And is wrong this time.  The delimiter is a word, not
a syllable, and must follow the rules for Lojban words.  So "ma." is fine,
and so is "la'o", but "tsy." is not usable.  Of course, the word need not
have any meaning; it need merely be morphologically valid.

This set of rules allows you, with a little thought, to quote English text
which itself contains Lojban text:

        la .and. cusku zoi tsulu. Colin said, "mi'e kolin." .tsulu

where "tsulu" is morphologically valid, but is a meaningless gismu and so
not likely to occur in Lojban-within-English-within-Lojban, unless of course
the 2nd-order Lojban text itself contains a 2nd-order English text, in
which case......