Getting started with Lojban (alpha)

Terminators

How would you say "the person promises a friend that the dog gives"? With the vocabulary that has been taught so far, you can't, at least not without moving sumti places around. lo prenu cu nupre lo nu lo gerku cu dunda lo pendo doesn't work. lo gerku ends up inside the lo nu abstraction in dunda's x₂ place, which implies the dog is giving a friend as a gift, which is not what is meant.

You could rearrange the sentence to put the abstraction sumti at the end: lo prenu cu nupre fi lo pendo fe lo nu lo gerku cu dunda. This works here, but not always. For example you wanted to put three abstraction sumti in a sentence, you're out of luck, because you have to put two next to each other, not separated by the cu . Also, having to always re-arrange sentences like this can be tedious.

To solve this, Lojban has cmavo called famyma'o, or "terminators" in English. These allow you to close off any grammatical structure, so you can place a sumti after an abstraction without putting it inside the abstraction by closing it with the famyma'o kei.

kei elidable terminator: end abstraction bridi

For completeness, there's two other famyma'o for grammatical constructs that we've learned so far. They are ku for description sumti and vau for trailing sumti after the selbri.

ku elidable terminator: end description

vau famyma'o: terminates bridi.

Terminator elision

The reason that you've not seen any of these words before is because Lojban allows for famyma'o to be elided (skipped). Terminators act like right parentheses, except that if the sentence would not parse with them, they are added from the inside out until the sentence parses. Consider this example with actual brackets

a(b{c[d(e f} g

We can actually deduce that the balanced version must be:

a(b{c[d(e f)]} g)

It would not make sense any other way. Terminators in Lojban work the same way, except grammatical constructs are the opening brackets, and terminators are the closing brackets. If elided, a terminator is treated as being in its rightmost possible position.

Lojbanists rely on this feature constantly. Most sentences produced by proficient users of the language include no redundant (rightmost position) terminators at all. Lojban speakers do not think of elision as the exception to a rule of including all terminators, they think of terminator inclusion as a way to avoid undesirable sentence structure.

cu means the main verb comes next, so all the precededing nouns and abstractions must be terminated.

Lojban sentences with all redundant terminators included can get very long, consider the sentence from the top of this page, for example:

Imagine needing to say all that! Additionally, this pair of sentences demonstrates how much clearer marking the start of a selbri is compared to the end of every sumti. There's only one selbri per clause but potentially many sumti. The start of a selbri is a much more important structural boundary than the end of the sumti before it.

Terminator usage may seem difficult, but it gets easier with practice.

Exercises

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

Translate the following sentences from English into Lojban, making sure you include terminators where necessary:

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.

Notice

This chapter has been completely rewritten by la .samflir., .ziren. and la nalvai as part of a rework of Lojban.io's course to replace the "terminator-first" style of teaching used in the Wave Lessons with the "terminator-later" style used in Lojban For Beginners.

Other chapters have been modified to remove redundant terminators while keeping the content mostly the same. If you have feedback on this course's consistency or clarity regarding terminators, please ping la .samflir. in the roljbogu'e Discord server or open an issue on GitHub.