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Nitpicks; just pay attention...



>Date:         Mon, 16 Aug 1993 10:50:24 +0100
>From: Colin Fine <C.J.Fine%BRADFORD.AC.UK@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU>

>la'o grync And grync cusku la'o gyk
> i

>dihu mi setese ciksi le krinu be le sohi pihonciha se srera
>sepahu roledo notci vekaha le jboxemrmri .i
>- bahe mi damba le tutcrvi .iucuhi ku vaho le vanbrlunixy
>faho

>[notes: I mean "sepahu" to link to "srera", "vekaha" to
>"notci", and "vaho" to "damba". "Tutcrvi" = the Vi editor
>of unix. "Vanbrlunixy" = (suitably ghastly) fuhivla for
>unix.]  i

All this discussion is excellent, especially since so much of it is in
Lojban, but I think people are starting to lose sight of some of the
minutiae regarding some of lojban's methods, so here's a gentle reminder
regarding two that I keep seeing. (correct me if I'm wrong)

1)  {la'o} vs. {zoi}.  With so many people starting to use {la'o} for their
names, people seem to be getting the impression that {la'o} is the way to
quote foreign text (see above).  This is not so.  {la'o} is how to quote
foreign *names*, {zoi} quotes foreign text.  The two words are in the same
selma'o, and thus have the same grammar, but their meanings are different.
{la'o delim. text delim.} translates to "That named 'text'", just as {la
mark.} means "that named 'mark'"; the difference is that the former can use
names that are not lojbanically legal or even lojbanically representable
(hand-signs, music, etc).  {zoi delim. text delim.} means "the
utterance/text 'text'", much like le'u/lo'u quotes, except that its
contents can be anything.  So in the above quotation, {la'o grync. And
.grync. cusku zoi gyk whatever gyk} is the way it should be.

2) le'avla/fu'ivla.  This seems to be a particular nit on this one case.
Le'avla are forbidden from using {y}, and I think this should be especially
true at the end.  The only lojban words that can end with -y are lerfu BY
and Y, and they must be followed by pauses to keep them from being
considered consonant clusters with the following word.  Le'avla aren't
followed by pauses (something Nick at least used to forget, and they also
must have penultimate stress, something else that gets violated).

~mark