Getting started with Lojban (alpha)

Terminator elision

Consider this sentence:

Regardless of whether the above sentence is being understood, (it shouldn't, as it contains words we have not covered in these lessons yet) one thing stands out: as more complex Lojban structures are learned, more and more of the sentences get filled with ku, kei, ku'o and other of those words which by themselves carry no meaning.

The function of all these words is to signal the end of a certain grammatical construct, like for instance "convert selbri to sumti" in the case of ku. The English word for this kind of word is terminator, while the Lojban word is famyma'o. They are underlined in the example above.

Note: The vau in the above example are the famyma'o for "end bridi". There is a good reason you have not yet seen it – stay tuned.

vau famyma'o: terminates bridi.

In most spoken and written Lojban, most famyma'o are skipped (elided). This greatly saves syllables in speech and space in writing. However, one must always be careful when eliding famyma'o. In the simple example lo gerku ku pendo, removing the famyma'o ku would yield lo gerku pendo, which is a single sumti made from the tanru gerku pendo. Thus, it means "a dog-ish friend" instead of "the dog is friendly". Indeed, famyma'o elision can lead to very wrong results if done incorrectly, which is why you haven't learned about it until now.

The rule for when famyma'o can be elided is very simple, at least in theory: you can elide a famyma'o, if and only if doing so does not change the grammatical constructs in the sentence. In other words, a construct extends as far right as possible, until either its famyma'o or another word not allowed in the construct appears.

Most famyma'o can be safely elided at the end of the bridi. This is why vau is almost never used – simply beginning a new bridi with .i will almost always terminate the preceding bridi anyway.

Knowing the basic rules for famyma'o elision, we can thus return to the original sentence and begin removing famyma'o:

je'u mi djica lo nu le merko noi tunba mi vau ku'o ku jimpe lo du'u mi na nelci lo nu ri darxi mi vau kei ku vau kei ku vau kei ku vau

We can see that the first vau is grammatically unnecessary, because the next non-famyma'o-word is jimpe, which is a selbri. Since there can only be one selbri per bridi, vau is not needed. Since jimpe as a selbri cannot be in the relative clause either (only one bridi in a clause, only one selbri in each bridi), we can elide ku'o. Likewise, jimpe cannot be a second selbri inside the construct "le merko noi{...}", so the ku is not needed either. Furthermore, all the famyma'o at the very end of the sentence can be elided too, since beginning a new bridi will terminate all of these constructs anyway.

We then end up with:

je'u mi djica lo nu le merko noi tunba mi jimpe lo du'u mi na nelci lo nu ri darxi mi

with no famyma'o at all!

Selbri separator

When eliding famyma'o, it is a good idea to be acquainted with cu. It is one of those words which can make your (Lojbanic) life a lot easier. What it does is to separate any previous sumti from the selbri. One could say that it defines the next word to be a selbri, and terminates exactly as much as it needs to in order to do that.

cu elidable marker: separates selbri from preceding sumti, allows preceding famyma'o elision.

Note: cu is not a famyma'o, because it is not tied to one specific construct. But it can be used to elide other famyma'o.

One of the greatest strengths of cu is that it quickly becomes easy to intuitively understand. By itself it means nothing, but it reveals the structure of Lojban expressions by identifying the core selbri. In the original example with the violent American brother, using cu before jimpe does not change the meaning of the sentence in any way, but might make it easier to read.

Notation

Sometimes, even though a certain famyma'o may be elidable, doing so may make the sentence more difficult to understand. For this reason, we recommend exercising good judgment while performing famyma'o elision. The ultimate goal is being understood, not being as terse as possible.

Throughout the remainder of this course, we may sometimes place famyma'o inside curly brackets. This means that the given famyma'o could have been elided without changing the structure of the sentence, but we nevertheless chose to be (somewhat) explicit about it, either to pinpoint its placement or to help make the sentence more understandable. For example, we could write lo prenu {ku} cu tavla to indicate that there is still an implicit ku to terminate lo prenu, and that it is (implicitly) placed before cu.

Exercises

It's now time for you to attempt a few more translations.

Translate the following sentences from English into Lojban, trying to elide as many famyma'o as you can:

Practice

As usual, before proceeding to the next lesson, get some practice with interactive exercises – look for the "Practice" button nearby!

Beware that exercises loop indefinitely, so feel free to stop once you feel you've had enough. And be sure to revisit exercises on different days, to benefit from the spacing effect.