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Will xorban ever have something like sumtcita? What about relative clauses?I assume that you can make do without either, but they are probably a useful shortcut.
If, say, "mi citka lo plise ca lo nu lo gerku mi batci", you can just turn it into a bridi based on cabna:
la fa le plse ctka'ake li fi lo grko btcoka'a cbnaki Obviously, this requires quite a bit of forethought.(Can you reset the l- variables when entering an abstraction? I guess if not, you'd run out of V's pretty quick if the sentence gets long and has lots of nesting) Would this one be correct as well (hoping that the other one even worked, my first try at producing anything non-trivial)?:
la fa la plsa ctka'aka le fe la grka btcaka'aAnyway, since this is probably not always convenient, I'm wondering if maybe a subordinate clause system would be useful. I think you only really need one word to get both sumtcita and relative clauses. (And it doesn't seem parentheticals are really about that, am I right?)
Let's say that cmavo is ... it seems all CV's are already taken. Can cmavo be CC(V) ? Well let's pretend the cmavo is bn- (you can change it to anything you want, this is just to describe the idea). Then, bnV, depending on the vowel, adds a subordinate clause to the variable V. Then the referent set of that V are restricted to only those referents for which the subordinate clause is true:
le mlte bne li jbmi plpeki nlca'ake I like the cat that jumped on the table.I'm not sure whether a ke'a-equivalent is needed. You could also just force the head of the relative clause to be filling the first argument place and making that place unfillable, but maybe this makes things less flexible. On the other hand, it makes the sentences shorter, so that the following means the same:
le mlte bne li jbmi plki nlca'akeHmm, this actually suggests to me that a sixth vowel would be quite useful, it would be the variable of the current sentence itself. But I don't know what vowel to pick, I dislike using schwa for this. Maybe instead of a new vowel, we can add a new variable, like the ones for a'a and e'e, that refers to the current sentence, say u'a or something, then:
le zdne bnu'a li mrli ttciku'a zbsa'ake I build a house using a hammer. (ttc = tutci) lit. "I build a house, a hammer being the tool used to to it".The bnu'a clause restricts the sentences referent such that it must be true that a hammer was used to do SENTENCE. I think semantically it would be wrong to use a bnu'a without having a u'a-suffix appear in the predicate as well. Since it attaches to the sentence, bnu'a can go anywhere before the predicate, which is nice.
What do you think?Also, it seems there is no way to not have the predicate come last, right? So once I've said the predicate, the sentence is over, I can't add any more arguments. Maybe a better way of thinking about it is that when listing the arguments, it's more like filling a prenex, and the actual order of the arguments is decided by the affixes on the predicate.
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i -- pilno zo le xu .i lo dei bangu cu se cmene zo lojbo .e nai zo lejbo doị mèlbi mlenì'u .i do càtlu ki'u ma fe la xàmpre ŭu .i do tìnsa càrmi gi'e sìrji se tàrmi .i taị bo pu cìtka lo gràna ku