BEGINNER'S QUESTION: internal sumti

[Nick Summers <nsummers@hutch.com.au>]

I'm new to lojban, and although I find it fascinating and I've been
devoting qute a bit of time to it, I also, possibly not too
surprisingly, find aspects of it impenetrable.

Taking an example from the Diagrammed Grammar:

        ta cu tavla be do bei le melbi ku be'o vecnu

Am I correct in the following assumptions:

  1  < tavla vecnu > is a tanru for 'salesperson'
     (is there a list of tanru anywhere?);
  2  ta is the x1 place of vecnu (place structures being
     determined by the second-placed word in the tanru);
  3  within tavla (which implicitly takes x1),
     < be do > is x2,
     < bei le melbi ku be'o > is x3,
     and x4 is unspecified and thus ellided;

The following breakdown of place-structures and sub-place-structures
should (I hope) make explicit my understanding of the various
relationships:

(definitely requires fixed width font)


    ta  cu  tavla  be  do  bei  le  melbi  ku  be'o  vecnu  vau
    | |     |   |  |    |  |                      |       |   |
    | |     -----  ------  ------------------------       |   |
    | |    imp.x1    x2               x3                  |   |
    | |     |                                     |       |   |
    | |     ---------------------------------------       |   |
    | |                tavla (unspec. x4)                 |   |
    | |                                                   |   |
    | |                                                   |   |
    ---                                                   |   |
    x1                                                    |   |
    |                                                     |   |
    -------------------------------------------------------   |
    |                    vecnu                                |
    |                                                         |
    -----------------------------------------------------------
                                             bridi


Note that this is completely different from the diagram provided in
the grammar, but I am trying to understand something other than
logical groupings. (...am I not?)

The translation offered for this bridi in the grammar is:

"That is a talker-to-you-about-the-beautiful-thing(s) salesperson.
(or, more simply)
That's a salesperson who talks to you about beautiful things."

Now, if there weren't a confirmation somewhere further down the page
that < tavla vecnu > really was a tanru for salesperson, I would at
this point have assumed, from my readings of the gismu list, that
vecnu could in itself be used to mean salesperson, and be done with
it. But it seems to me that, by the metaphor-making rule that the
first word modifies the second, the bridi contained in the
tavla{internal-sumti} should act in this modifying way on vecnu,
yielding something like...

(using points instead of spaces to link the parts of a
sumti/concept-group)

"That is a talker.to.you.about.beautiful.things-salesperson..."

...which almost agrees with the initial translation, and by my
understanding and placement of the x1 for vecnu above implies that
"That..." is indeed the salesperson, but also that the concept of
salesperson has been modified in some way, as in "The salesperson..."
versus "The big salesperson...". What I don't understand is how the
(supposedly) modifying first half of the tanru suddenly separates off
from the (supposedly) modified second half and becomes its own almost
clausal part of the (part) sentence. Are the two halves of the tanru
not somehow implicitly joined, as for example in blari'o, blue-green?
(Does the fact that blue and green have been explicitly joined into a
lujvo have anything to do with it?) Is my understanding of metaphora
incomplete?

In the second translation above, isn't the "...who..." misplaced?
Shouldn't it be something like
"That is a talker.to.you.about.beautiful.things-salesperson who...
(performs some as yet unspecified action)"? I do of course realise
that the sentence is complete in itself as presented in the example;
I'm just having a little trouble with its interpretation. Not to
mention inventing bridi of my own.

Can someone shed some light on this for me?

The discussion of internal sumti appears quite early in the general
discussion; is it a tricky point? Or in my search for complexity have
I overlooked the simple solution?

And lastly, a call to arms!

Are there any other beginners out there? I've been lurking on the lojban
list for about a month, and on the aux/conlang lists for a couple of
days,
so I may be jumping the gun slightly, but the discussion seems to bounce
back and forth between a dozen or so illuminated souls who seem, in the
case of lojban at least, to have been born speaking the damn language.
The
discussions are interesting, and occasionally relevant (and here I
stress:
in the context of the BEGINNER), but if there are any others out there
in
the same boat as I am, how about a query or two that might be relevant
to
folk like us? Or even some private mailings? I'd be happy etc etc etc...

----

Nick