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On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 09:34:02PM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote: > So the answer to what are you doing is "Go don say sey" I give something > to somebody. > > So a terminator wd save only one syllable, or am I missing something? Well, it would save one syllable in the event that you need the terminator. Almost all terminators in Lojban are elidable in the majority of situations, so it would save two syllables. If it's not in a sub-clause, and even sometimes when it is, "go don saj sej" would just be "go don". And it would get very tiring to say "saj sej" all the time. Let me point out how "something" works in Lojban. The normal "something" as in "it doesn't matter what it is" is "zo'e", which has a different referent each time so only one word is necessary. It isn't actually said all that often, because all unfilled places are "zo'e" by default. "mi citka" (I eat) = "mi citka zo'e" (I eat something; what it is isn't important.) Lojban's "da, de, di" (the equivalent of Loglan's b-series) are qualified "something"s that can be re-used, and which assign importance to the "something". "da cevni" (there is a god) is a more powerful statement than the observative "cevni". Now I'll continue with the tradition of throwing in an unrelated topic at the end of the message. I see that you capitalize your example phrases in Ceqli. Capitalization is nice and familiar, but in anything resembling Logban it's not especially useful. You'll almost certainly need a sentence separator; capitalizing the beginning of a sentence would almost always capitalize that. (And that's what they did in Loglan. Seeing all those "I"s made me wonder why they bothered with capitalization.) -- Rob Speer