RE: lemi malfri

[cbmvax!uunet!oasis.icl.co.uk!I.Alexander.bra0122]

Wow!  We've an awful lot of Lojban text all
of a sudden.  Looks like you've started something
Colin :)

la'o ly. lemi malfri .ly. zo'u

> >pukucaki .i ca le pasobino nanca ku mi pamoi pilno la lysydys .i mi citka
> >renono mikrygrake be le xukmi .ibabo mi xanka denpa le xuksne

Mark> I'm a little fuzzy about that {pukucaki}... oh, wait, I see it.  I think.
Mark> You're establishing the sentence in the past and making its tense sticky?
Mark> I'm still unsure.

I can't help feeling that {pukucaki} belongs _in place of_ the
shortly-following {ca}

        .i puku caki le pasobinomoi nanca
        In-the-past, at-the-time-of [sticky] the "1980"[th] year

(The missing {moi} is just a typo - it reappears in the interlinear
version.)

Nick> I don't like {pamoi pilno}, but all the alternative phrasings would be
Nick> quite complex; let it be.

Why not {pamoi nu pilno}?

Mark> {grake} has no x2 place, in my gismu list, and neither, I suspect, would
M> {mikrygrake}.  Thus, attaching with {be} doesn't work.  How about {le xukmi
M> pela'u renono mikrygrake}?  The {pe} may not be necessary, but I think it's
M> better to have it.

It has an x2 place in all mine, but it's the _number_ of (micro)grams.
The simplest fix, keeping the (malglico? :) order, seems to be

        renono mikrygrake be sela'u lei xukmi

(as-a-quantity-of).  My one-time candidate for most Lojbanic phrasing
was
        le xukmi poi mikrygrake li renono
        the chemical restricted-to being-micrograms-in-number 200
until di'e.

{mikrygrake} is a _quantifier_, isn't it?

        vei ni'e mikrygrake beli renono [ve'o] lei xukmi
        micrograms-in-number 200 [amount-of] the-mass-of chemical

Any takers?

{ta'o lo'u le nu to'i basna toi xuksne le'u}, as Nick
pointed out elsewhere.

> >ni'o lemi patfu to'ercliva le lanzu zdani .i ko'a goi la pat. bevri lo cnino
> >ke vidnyveibra

Mark> I suspect
M> you should use {le cnino li'o} and not {lo}, since it was a particular one
M> in question, but I have pretty much never seen anyone use le/lo in this
M> way; people get drawn into the English the/a usage, which is not-lojbanic.
M> It's something we should work on.

I've some things to say about gadri, but I think it's important
enough to have a selmri to itself.

> >ni'o ko'a klama lemi kumfa noi mi denpa .ilu doi deiv tu'a ko rinka lenu se

Nick> Or if you don't like {tu'a}, {ko zukte lenu...}.
Or even (why not?) {ko gasnu lenu li'o}.

> >ni'o .uecai mi drani gasnu la'edi'u .i ko'a babo ckire mi .ibabo mi vreta
                                             ^^^^
What's that {babo} doing there?  {.ibabo ko'a li'o} would at least
be grammatical, but I don't think it's very useful.  Story time
marches on :)

Iain.