Re: la bradfrd jbogirz

[cbmvax!uunet!mullian.ee.mu.oz.au!nsn]

fi'i drai,ad. mi gleki lenu do cfari lenu cilre loi lojbo .i xu do jikydjuno
fi la silvian. RUtiser. noi mrilu se judri le la MEriland. balcu'e

>Am i right in reading "le mi selci'a" as "my text"?  "mi" here serves as a
>possessive?

Yes. A construct built explicitly to model that English construction. Any
sumti can be put in that position, but {ku} is usually necessary to keep
things together. Thus: {le le noltru gerku} would get parsed as
{le (le noltru gerku KU) KU)} = The King Dog's [blank]; {le le noltru ku
gerku} = {le (le noltru KU) gerku KU} = The King's Dog. The possessive
is the most imprecise one: {pe}: {le mi selci'a} = {le selci'a pe mi}

>Why does it start with "coi la tcidu"... tcidu is a gismu, right?  Does "la"
>put tcidu into the "vocative case"?

{la} is not compulsory --- any gismu or cmene after {coi} --- or something
of the same grammatical category, like {fi'i} above --- is vocative. The
{la} is optional, and to my knowledge, entails no meaning change.

>What exactly does "bo" do?  Extract the x1 of the previous sentence?

{bo} has various functions, none of which are that one. In the text you
saw, {bo} stops the "preposition" preceding it from swallowing the
"noun" following it. Thus {.i ba le gerku cu cliva} would mean "After
[the event of] the dog, [someone] leaves" - which is not good Lojban,
since "you leave after the dog" gets translated as "you leave after the
dog does" - whereas {.i babo le gerku cu cliva} makes the whole sentence
hang off the previous one, linked by the preposition {ba}: "Afterwards/
After what happened in the previous sentence, the dog leaves"

>What does he mean by "skami nelci"?  ("mi skami nelci")

computer-likes --- an ambiguous way of saying "likes computers"

>Doesn't "tarmi naldikni" mean something like "shaped disorder"?  Or does it
>mean "disordered shape" (seemingly a more appropriate description of a fan)?

{le naldikni} is SOMETHING disordered (the x1 of the selbri {naldikni});
disorder would be {le ka naldikni}. Thus {tarmi naldikni} means "shape
disordered-thing" -- something which is a disordered thing as far as
shape is concerned --- which is close enough to "disordered chape".

>Finally... how does the last sentence ("ri jo'u gi snuji lei sovda joi tamca
>le burna'a gi le ckafi") work?  Is "snuji" the selbri here?  Why is "gi"
>in front of the selbri and in front of a sumti?  How does this work?

That {le} shouldn't be there; {jo'u gi... gi} joins two selbri, or two
sumti (but JOI + GI in forethought is grammar-to-come, not current
grammar); of {ri} it can be said that it is {snuji lei sovda joi tamca
le burna'a} IN-COMMON-WITH {ckafi}

>Thank you for your patience...

*shrug* It's been nice :) I was out of practice in this sorta thing...

---
'Dera me xhama t"e larm"e,	      T  Nick Nicholas, EE & CS, Melbourne Uni
 Dera mbas blerimit		      |  nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au (IRC: Nicxjo)
 Me xhama t"e larm"e!		      |  Milaw ki ellhnika/Esperanto parolata/
 Lumtunia nuk ka ngjyra tjera.'	      |  mi ka'e tavla bau la lojban. je'uru'e
 - Martin Camaj, _Nj"e Shp'i e Vetme_ |                *d'oh!*