Did you ever think the current method is less than optimal? I'm talking about the use of lerfu pro-sumti that refer back to the last sumti whose first letter is the same as the lerfu. It's probably the best we currently have, but it has some big flaws. Not only is it hard to keep track of the first letter of all the words that have been uttered, but it also happens that we'd like to refer back to, say, {lo mlatu}, but then before we can do so, another sumti that starts with M appeared in the meantime, so that {my} can no longer refer to the cat. The only way out is to repeat the entire sumti, which can be much longer than just {lo mlatu}. In any case, it's not reliable enough.

I have an idea  — and it's surely insane — that could put an end to this shortcoming.

The lerfu pro-sumti could be repurposed. In a big way.

Instead of having them refer to a previous word that begin with the corresponding letter, each lerfu would have a defined meaning, a type of thing that it refers to, reliably.  There would be one that refers back to the most recent living thing, the most recent person, object, abstract thing and many more. Below is a list of possible referents. I based the letters on gismu to make them easier to remember:

Let us look at some of the amazing things we can do with this.

    (1) na go'i .i mi pu no roi zvati sy
        "No. I have never been there."

    (2) fy dunda lo kargu junla ny
        "She gave him an expensive watch."

    (3) mi .e lo mensi be mi pu klama sy .i ku'i fy na nelci sy
        "Me and my sister went there, but she didn't like it."

    (4) ko xrugau dy lo pu te tolcri be fi do
        "Put it back where you found it."

    (5) my cinri sidbo
        "That is an interesting idea."

I can think of more things to put in the above table, this is just a proof of concept, for you to try out.

Though let me warn you. If you use this for a while, you might never want to go back. It's so powerful! It almost feels like cheating, that's how good it is. Suddenly, all the prior clumsy make-shift anaphora mechanisms are no longer needed, and what used to be a difficult area of the language has turned into a cakewalk.

But of course this whole idea is crazy.

In a recent post I talked about algorithmically created, gismu-like fu'ivla. For thos who thought that a word like kankazo would be hard to recognize (which I personally don't mind, as gismu are largely the same), the method described in this post might present a nice alternative.As I already said in the aforementioned blog post, I find CVC/CVCV and CCVCVCV the prettiest fu'ivla shapes (and I like very few others). If we look closely, we'll find that both shapes' first five letters are gismu-shaped:

    CVCCVCV
    CCVCVCV

followed by a lone CV in both cases. This gave me an idea.

If the first five letters form a gismu, then the old gismu-making algorithm can be used as is in order to create the first five letters of the fu'ivla. Then, and this is new, the trailing CV would be dependent on the kind of word that is being made; like the head of stage-3 fu'ivla, this CV would be taken from the related gismu (the first two letters for CVCCV gismu and the second and third for CCVCV gismu).
For example, say we want to make a new word for "frog". We first run the algorithm and get {tenca} (yes, I did run the algorithm). Then we add {-ba} (from {banfi}) and get our fu'ivla {tencaba}.
The first five letters give the word a (potentially) recognizeable sound (easier to remember for some), and the final CV tells the general type of the word, in the case of {-ba} it tells us that it's a banfi, an amphibian.
This method would be a hybrid between pure stage-3 (which I personally find quite ugly) and my previous idea for generated stage-4 fu'ivla.

Here is a short list of class suffixes:
    -ma     mabru         mammal
    -fi        finpe            fish
    -ba      banfi            amphibian
    -la       mlatu           cat
    -ri        tricu             tree
    -pa      spati             plant
    -ci        cipni           bird
    -ru       grute           fruit

and so on.

What do you think?

(note that CVCCVCV is prone to tosmabru, so it might be better to limit the fu'ivla of this system to CCVCVCV, which means that only CCVCV gismu candidates can be used)

Clearly, {lo} is the most common word by far in any (modern) text, but {cu}, {gi'e} and {cusku} also tend to be extremely common. I hope you find the clouds pretty, click on them to see a bigger image. Oh, and I think you can guess of which texts they are clouds without much difficulty (unless you've been living under a rock). :)
To get a fullscreen view of the images, click them, and then on the website, choose open in window and then maximize the window to fullscreen. Otherwise it can be hard to see some of the smaller (less common) words.

Imagine not knowing the definition of {banzu}, and being told that there is a gismu that means "enough/sufficient", what place structure would you intuitively expect it to have? Turns out not everyone has the same intuition here!

Personally I always thought {banzu} was a wee bit clumsy. The x1 can be anything, but it feels like sumti-raising most of the time. I tend to use a {ni} in banzu1:

    (1) lo ni mi certu cu banzu lo nu mi snada
        "The amount of [I am skilled] is enough for [I succeed] to happen"
        "I am skilled enough to succeed."

But there is also usage like:

    (2) lo xance cu banzu lo nu bevri
        "A hand is enough to carry it."

It's basically sumti-raising, since "having a hand" or "using a hand" is what is actually meant.

For a long time now, I have felt that {banzu} should parallel {sarcu}. {sarcu} is the "necessary condition", and with {banzu} there could be the "sufficient condition", which is a useful and necessary (no pun intended) word to have. The place structure would simply be:

    (a) x1 (nu) is a sufficient condition/is enough for x2 (nu) to happen under conditions x3

Everybody knows I like parallelism in Lojban, so such a definition would sit well with me. It's a pretty counterpart to {sarcu}.

    (3) lo nu mi sanga cu banzu lo nu mi gleki
        "Me singing is enough for me to be happy."    (also yet another case where nu/ka polymorphism would be useful)
   
This also adds an additional nuance to the Lojban conditionals:

    (4) banzu lo nu mi do fraxu kei fa lo nu do nupre lo ka na za'u re'u tai tarti
        "I will forgive you if only you promise me not to behave like that again."

On the other hand, latro'a, another Lojbanist, happened to not pay very close attention to the actual definition of {banzu}, and intuitively kept using a definition that they felt was appropriate. That definition was along the lines of:

    (b) x1 (object) is sufficiently/enough of x2 (ka/ni) for x3 to happen

In my opinion, this is also a useful definition! This definition is especially useful for lujvo, something which the actual {banzu} is terrible at, which I had to realize time and again upon trying to use it in lujvo. The natural tendency for me was to place {banzu} as the veljvo tertau, but then, where does the seltau go? The x1 is where it should go, but that isn't how lujvo tend to be formed. "Good enough" could be anything of {xagbanzu}, {bazyxau} or {selbazyxau}. In any case, it feels clumsy. This last definition makes making lujvo very easy, "good enough" is simply {banzu lo ka xamgu} -> {xagybanzu} (meanwhile I shed a tear over the fact that {banzu} has no short terminal rafsi).

The big point here is that I believe that both definitions, definition (a) and (b), are useful and should have a brivla. They can't both be {banzu}, however. Either we give one of them {banzu} and make a lujvo for the other, or we create a new gismu for one of them. I don't really have a preference for one option over the other, I just hope that both meanings end up with a nice brivla. Or rather: both definitions getting a brivla is a sufficient condition for my happiness! ;)

I don't have a good introduction, so I'm going to jump right in.
Borrowing words straight from Latin (or the Latin-Greek pseudo-language used in taxonomy), while probably more culturally neutral than a lazy borrowing from modern English, is still quite a euro-centric practice. Moreover, I find it a bit strange sometimes to use Linnean names for "everyday" animals or plants/fruit. Not to mention that in order to make them legal lojban words, they have to mangled quite a bit sometimes. For example, when the source word contains no consonant clusters, it's necessary to switch the order of some of the letters to artificially create clusters. Take the word for "birch" I recently made. The Linnean name is "Betula". I had to turn it into {.eptula}. Not too bad, but the above points apply; it's Latin (ish), but modified, to the degree that it becomes questionable if the relation to the Linnean source word is even helpful or obvious enough anymore (not that most people even know the Linnean names of things!).

So what I'm trying to say is that it might not be optimal to borrow such general words as those for animals from a single language, be it Latin or English. On the other hand, local concepts deserve to be borrowed directly from wherever they are local to, as there is usually only one language (or a group of related langauges) that even have a word for it. My idea for non-local words is to create fu'ivla using an algorithm much like the one used for making gismu. More on that later, first I want to talk about fu'ivla shapes.

I generally like type-4s much better than type-3s. Type-3s are too different from the rest of the native lojban words, they stick out too much. It's distracting, and the extra gismu head adds unnecessary syllables.
Type-4s, however, can be very pretty. There are lots of possible shapes, most of them aren't all that nice, but there are two in particular that really float my boat.

My favorites are fu'ivla and zi'evla of the shape CCVCVCV and CVC/CVCV, e.g. sorpeka or tceraso.

What is so great about them? They go well with the other native lojban brivla, like lujvo or gismu. They don't stick out like a sore thumb, but fit in harmoniously.

So, naturally, I would suggest using these forms over any other.

Let's create an example algorithmic fu'ivla that uses the words from the six most widely spoken languages. How about a word for "carrot". (yeah, I already made a fu'ivla for that recently: {ka'orta}, but it's based on Latin again, though I do like it more than {najgenja}).

So, carrot.

I just used some random dictionaries to find the translations below, and I don't have a way to verify their accuracy, so please don't be too harsh, this is just an example afterall.

Chinese: xulu'obo
Bengali: gaiara
English: karot (whether or not this should be karyt is really not important for this example)
Spanish: zana'oria
Russian: morkov
Arabic: iazarun

Using the (by now outdated) weightings...

Chinese 0.347
Hindi 0.196
English 0.160
Spanish 0.123
Russian 0.089
Arabic 0.085

We get lots of fu'ivla candidates, of which we only need to pick the best.

I haven't worked out the best scoring algorithm, but I think we could simply make some adjustments to the gismu algorithm and use that. For this example, I did everything by hand, so the result is not guaranteed to correspond to the one the algorithm would spit out. Let's say it tells us that the top three candidates are:

— kankazo
— grukoru
— ka'urko (whoops that one slipped in there by accident, it actually has a different shape, but came to me naturally, so maybe such a shape is also worth considering. This shape is CVVCCV, like ka'orta)

What's left is to decide is when to use CCVCVCV and when CVC/CVCV (and when CVVCCV). Maybe there are cases where one of them is better (has a higher score) than the other. Otherwise it would be an arbitrary choice which one to pick.

Anyway, I think I really like this idea. It sort of adds a second layer of "gismu" to the lexicon, except they aren't gismu and so can be easily recognized as not being part of the core vocab, which means they don't need to be learned as early. At the same time, they are as culturally neutral as possible, or at least as neutral as gismu, and much more neutral than Linnean borrowings. Plus, they feel like real Lojban words!

Well, not officially I suppose, but they should be. It's very easy to see how {po'o} has scope, and how the bridi changes if something passes through its scope boundary. Possibly the simplest example is to combine {na} and {po'o} and see how the different scopes work:

    (1) mi po'o na nelci lo tceraso
        "I'm the only one who doesn't like cherries."

    (2) na ku mi po'o nelci lo tceraso
        "It's not just me who likes cherries."

The difference is huge, as it should be if {po'o} is a bridi operator. It's very useful to have both meanings available, too, so I see little chance to argue that {po'o} is not a bridi operator.

I have the feeling that {po'o}'s scope gets overlooked completely by most people. From a logical point of view, it is not so surprising for {po'o} to have scope, since, in logic, "only" implies a quantifier.

    Logically: "only X does Y" == "all Y are X"

For example:

    (3a) mi citka lo badna ku po'o
          "I ate only bananas."

can be expressed as:

    (3b) ro lo selcti be mi cu badna
          "All I ate was bananas."

This also means that {po'o} is not strictly necessary, since {ro} can do its job. I have for a while been slightly unsatisfied with UI like {po'o} and {ji'a}, because, being UI, they need to be placed in awkward places to apply to the whole sumti, which is annoying for more complex sumti.

• The most economical one is: {lo ji'a broda be lo brode}, but something about it seems unattractive. Squeezing the UI between gadri and selbri is a bit awkward, and fails with non-gadri sumti.
• The afterthought version is {lo broda be lo brode be'o ku ji'a}, which is crazy as it requires one to use two explicit terminators (and potentially more in different situations) just to add a UI.
• Then there is the option to place the UI after an explicit FA: {FA ji'a lo broda be lo brode}. This is full forethought, and here my only complaint is that it's a bit strange to use explicit FA here, when you usually never do so otherwise. It's a bit artificial.

It would be useful if those UI whose scope is local like that were in BAhE...  (oh, and I will explain what I mean v´by "those UI" in a future article. The idea I have is that I feel some UI should be made less strict and always have bridi scope, while others should be local)

A completely different option is to not use such UI anymore and use predicates or quantifiers instead. This is the position I'm leaning towards with {po'o} at least.

As for {ji'a}, I think this one should also have a scope:

    (4a) mi ji'a na nelci lo tceraso
        "I, too, do not like cherries."

    (5a) na ku mi ji'a nelci lo tceraso
         "It's not true that: I, too, like tceraso."

I think the difference is visible. However, even though there clearly is a scope, I'm not sure how to expand {ji'a} to show where that scope comes from. What quantifier is hiding behind it? Actually, I think it might be a {su'o}.

Using {ji'a} implies that there exist others who also do X. It follows then that {A ji'a} is {A .e su'o drata be A}, and we're back to quantifiers, whose scope we know how to handle. So then

    (4b) mi .e su'o drata be mi cu na nelci lo tceraso
          "I and some others don't like cherries."

is logically equivalent to (4a), while

    (5b) na ku mi .e su'o drata cu nelci lo tceraso
          "It is not true that: I and some others like cherries."

corresponds to (5a). It expands to:

    (5c) na ku ge mi nelci lo tceraso gi su'o drata be mi cu nelci lo tceraso

If we move {na ku} to the right:

    (4c) ge mi na nelci lo tceraso gi su'o drata be mi na nelci lo tceraso

In these cases, using something else in place of {ji'a} would be quite inconvenient and the emphasis isn't quite the same either. If {ji'a} were in BAhE, it wouldn't be so awkward to use (I'm aware that it would mess with {.i ji'a}). It's also possible to use a predicate in place of {ji'a}, like {ziljmina} (I'm still confused why jmina got no short terminal rafsi, damn you {jinga}!), then {mi noi ziljmina} or {lo ziljmina no'u mi} are possible replacements, which I personally don't have a real problem with, except that {ziljmina} could be a bit prettier, but well, such a complaint is luxury.

Anyway, the bottom line is that there are UI that act like bridi operators and we need to be aware of them.

Ah Lojban. Thank you for having rafsi for cmavo. cmavo-rafsi are awesome. Some don't seem to have obvious uses, but sometimes you come across one that seems interesting, and if you're lucky, some really useful or interesting definitions come to mind.
This happened to me when I realized that {roi} has a rafsi, for example.

The pattern that comes to mind is that {Xroi} has the place structure "x1 happens X times during interval x2", where X is the "seltau part of the veljvo". Here are some examples, even including some where X is not a number:

soryroi: x1 happens often during interval x2
sotroi: x1 happens seldom during interval x2
nonroi: x1 happens zero times/never during interval x2
bazroi: x1 happens often enough during interval x2 for x3 to occur
dusroi: x1 happens too often during interval for x3 to occur
djiroi: x1 happens as often as x2 desires during interval x3
zmaroi: x1 happens more often than x2 during interval x3
mecroi: x1 happens less often than x2 during interval x3
etc.

I already added those to jbovlaste.

What makes me so happy is that this reminded me that Lojban has the power to create predicates for literally anything. Nothing stops us from making up predicates that have no counterparts in any other language. And of course it's also possible to compress elaborate statements into a single predicate. jvajvo do this all the time, but it's imaginable for any lujvo. For example, there could potentially be a (short) predicate that means "x1 sees a reflection of the moon in x2's eyes thereby feeling awe and being reminded of the amazing beauty of the universe" or something similarly specific just to name an example (feel free to post your ideas in the comments). There is so much potential here! I hope we will make the most of it.

By the way, I take no stock in pre-censorship. Even the sloppiest lujvo should have the right to see the light of this world. Usage will show if it can stand the test of time. If it does, then well, good for us. If not, no problem. The lexicon is self-correcting. It doesn't need people that filter out words. It will happen naturally anyway. Pre-censorship/self-censorship is destructive and can lead to perfectionism. If you have to think for hours over every word  you add, or if you have to put up with a discussion with nay-sayers everytime, chances are the word will never make it to the lexicon and nothing has been achieved. We won't get to see what it's like to use the word, be it crappy or not. All potential got nipped in the bud! I don't think that's the right way to do it.

So, instead, make words! Make lots of them, and don't be afraid of making bad ones. They might turn out to be good, you know? (What does it mean for a word to be good, anyway? ;) )

Following Lojban usage, I observe an extremely high number of scope mistakes. It appears that people are generally unaware. Their sentences are usually still understood "thanks" to the human capability of letting context fix scope dependencies. That's why these mistakes tend to go unnoticed. Nobody corrects these mistakes, and they keep on being made. It's a problem, but it's not too late to get a new awareness of scope.One of the most common scope mistake is this:

    (1) mi na terve'u lo stagi ki'u lo nu mi na bevri lo jdini
        "I did not buy vegetables because I didn't have money with me."

If you just read the English, your mind is likely to autocorrect the scope, causing you to miss the problem in the Lojban sentence. Though this might seem like an obvious mistake, I just saw someone make it again today.

Sentence (1) actually means:
       "That I bought vegetables because I didn't have money with me is false."

That's how the Lojban should be understood, but it often isn't. A practical fix is to use {.i ki'u bo}:

    (2) mi na terve'u lo stagi .i ki'u bo mi na bevri lo jdini
         "I didn't buy vegetables. The reason for that is that I didn't have money with me."

The other method requires forethought, which might seem annoying, but you'll soon come to realize (if you haven't already) that forethought is needed in all of Lojban the moment you begin to scope-juggle.

    (3) mi ki'u lo nu na bevri lo jdini cu na terve'u lo stagi
        "I, because [I] didn't have money with me, did not buy vegetables."

Case in point?

There are also cases of scope mistakes that I observe even among otherwise experienced Lojbanists. This is usually the case when multiple tenses are being used. Often, people just tack on an additional tense at the end of their already-tensed bridi, and the result is usually a sentence with incorrect scope, which the speaker doesn't notice.

There is a difference between {ca pu} and {pu ca}. There is a difference between {pu co'a} and {co'a pu}. You normally cannot reverse the order of bridi operators and expect to get the same result each time. While initially a difficulty, it's also one of the strong points of Lojban. It's the very thing Lojban is supposed to be good at. To neglect this aspect is to neglect Lojban.

Learning to use this feature correctly requires one to rethink. Lojban is not English. It's not even close. It just happens to sometimes be able to mirror the word order. It quickly stops doing that once the statements get more complex, at which time it drifts more towards SOV languages. It's not unnatural for a language to require constant forethoughts. Japanese and Turkish do it, just to name two. (Also note that when I say "forethought", I'm not talking about forethought connectives, although they can help. I'm talking about the general concept of thinking ahead).

Simply put, you have to learn (practically by rote, or by making the same mistake many times and correcting it until it sticks) what operators should precede what operators in what situation. Having some mental categories of different situations is very helpful and, I assume, inevitable. Well, to be sure, there are always other methods, but this one doesn't seem so painful. To give you an example, you need to simply know that a prenexed quantifier is required in this general instruction manual sentence:

        (4) "Thirdly, everyone holds on to the rope."

Suppose this is a sentence that describes a hypothetical setup that the instruction manual is trying to explain to you. We can argue that the rope is not definite. It can be any rope (so {lo} fits more than {le}), but everyone is supposed to hold on to the same rope, that's the important part. The naive translation fails:

        (4a) ci mai .ei ro lo prenu cu jgari lo skori

This doesn't tell us that everyone is supposed to hold on to the same rope. And we also cannot use {le} (and even if we could, it's not really the point of this example). (4a) is vague about the rope business. So what now? As I said, this type of situation needs a prenexed quantifier:

        (4b) ci mai .ei pa da poi skori zo'u: ro lo prenu da jgari

This tells us explicitly that each person is supposed to hold on to the same rope.

Yes, you can also just reverse the order of the sumti as in (5), but it would be a different kind of word order (which proves my point, but messes up the example. If you want to mirror the English, (4b) is the way to go).

       (5) ci mai .ei pa skori cu se jgari ro lo prenu

This one is shorter, not requiring an explicit prenex, and no explicit {da} binding. It does require one to change the order of the arguments, though, which might not always be desirable. Sometimes, placing a sumti in the x1 achieves a certain effect, e.g. topicalization and switching arguments can potentially ruin that.

It's also handy to know that generally location and time tags come before everything else, but you need to know in what types of situations they don't. For instance, try to figure out when you want {ca ... pu ...} and when {pu ... ca ...}. Also compare this to {vi ku ro da crino} vs {ro da vi crino}. Raise your awareness. But beware, you'll suddenly notice lots of mistakes! Maybe you don't want to eat of that tree.

Anyway, in this fashion every possible scenario can be put into a category.

I'm not going to lay out all those possibilities here. I think it's good to think about this topic for yourself and to compare the different meanings the different scopes produce.

Seeing so many scope mistakes every day is slightly painful for me, because I currently have a very high awareness of the subject matter. It's easy to overlook, and I wasn't always aware of it either. Heck, only recently did I realize that my staple {tai ... ja'e ...} has inccorect scope. I'm sure there are many more constructions out there that need to be reconsidered. I'm not afraid to re-adjust my Lojban, and I recommend everyone to do the same.

Lojban tends to be left-grouping, tanru and connectives for example are left-grouping. However, scope is ... "right-grouping". I'm not sure if others conceptualize it this way, but one way to parse multiple scopes is to consider each scope operator to create a sort of bubble to its right, and those bubbles are right-grouping. Abstractly:

                ⎛              ⎛                       ⎛          ⎞⎞⎞
        .i op1⎜   A   op2 ⎜  broda   B  op3⎜  C   D  ⎟⎜⎜
                ⎝                   ⎝                      ⎝           ⎠⎠⎠

op = bridi operator,  capital letters represent constants (i.e. unquantified sumti), the brackets should speak for themselves.

Obviously, I think scope should be given a lot more importance. It is the thing that determines the structure and word order of sentences. By acknowledging it, we can get closer to Lojban's true word order.

{nau} is a very useful word. It gives us an absolute Now, but it's only a sumtcita, so we cannot use it flexibly. For example, it's not possible to use it to say "Before the absolute now", because {nau pu broda} still has a {zo'e} hidden in the the {pu} (please don't (or do) pronounce it as "{zo'e} hidden in the poo"; sorry, I digress.) It really only means "In the absolute now, before something unspecified". This shortcoming led me to define two experimentals a while back: {pu'au} and {ba'au}, "absolute past" and "absolute future" respectively. However, I don't like experimental cmavo for things that should be achievable with what there already is. If a brivla for {nau} existed, then no problems would remain because {pu lo nau-BRIVLA} would mean what I want: "Before the absolute now".

I see three ways to get a brivla for {nau}:

1. A gismu that would have {nau} as a rafsi candidate, examples would be {nanbu} or {nadnu}. Of course this gismu must not interfere with already existing gismu, like {nanba}.
2. A lujvo of the form {n*a*u}. This lujvo would be to {nau} what {tamsmi} is to {tai}. Unfortunately, I don't think there is a lujvo that fits the meaning of {nau} and has this form.
3. Any lujvo that fits the meaning but has a non-resembling shape. This would be the least elegant, but it's the most likely solution.

What does {nau} mean in Lojban terms? I think it means something like:
    ca je bu'u lo nu dei se cusku                           ({nau} is not limited to time)

Once I have a satisfying nau-brivla, I will remove {pu'au} and {ba'au}.