First Steps in Lojban

I've been on a bit of a decluttering kick lately.

Oh? Do tell.

Tossing out old junk just feels so good!

It's a rare sight to see you being so tidy! Want to try some decluttering in Lojban while you're at it?

What do you mean? Is there junk in the language too?

The "junk" that most beginners (and even pros) want to get rid of are terminators—all those repetitive ku's:

lo ninmu ku klama lo tcadu ku lo zdani ku lo zarci ku lo karce ku The woman goes by car from home via the shop to the city.

Ugh, five ku tokens in a single sentence! That's a lot of work.

Well, Lojban actually lets you omit terminators whenever your intended meaning is clear to the listener. The golden rule is:

If dropping it doesn't change how the sentence is parsed, you can throw it away.

That sounds like a bit of a judgment call...

Here are the ABCs of Elision:

1. End-of-sentence terminators: You can almost always drop these.
2. ku: You can usually drop this, except when it's right before the selbri.
3. kei: Be very careful with this one. Don't drop it unless it's at the end of the sentence.

The key is that your "brackets" must still be unambiguous to the listener.

So:

lo ninmu ku klama lo tcadu lo zdani lo zarci lo karce

Wait, why can't we drop ku right before the selbri?

Look at what happens if you do:

lo ninmu klama lo tcadu …

That turns it into a tanru ("woman-type goer")! The listener won't know where the description ends and the main verb begins.

Precisely.

So that one ku has to stay? That's kind of annoying.

There's a better way! You can use cu—the selbri marker. It tells the listener "the main verb starts here," and it effectively closes all open descriptions before it.

Now that's much cleaner!

And what was the deal with not dropping kei in the middle of a sentence?

Words like nu and du'u are greedy—they will keep swallowing the following words into the sub-clause until they hit a kei. If you drop kei, they might swallow the rest of your sentence! cu can also act as a stop-gap, but it's safer to keep the kei visible unless it's at the very end.

Got it: lo/le descriptions are easy to close, so ku is often gone. But abstractions (NU) are greedy, so keep the kei around until the very end.