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22

First Steps in Lojban

Lesson 22. Quotation

Koshon
Koshon

Next up: quotation! We'll look at how to quote Lojban directly and indirectly, plus some handy tricks for referring back to things you've already said.

Grammatical Lojban — lu … li'u

lu
The opening quote for grammatically correct Lojban text.
li'u
The closing quote (make sure not to confuse it with lu'u!).

do cusku lu mi prami do li'u mi You said to me, “mi prami do.”

If you need to quote Lojban that isn't grammatically correct (like a list of random words or an unfinished sentence), you can use the more flexible lo'u ... le'u brackets.

Quote just one word: zo

mi se cmene zo .soran. My name is the word “soran.”

zo pu cu cmavo The word "pu" is a cmavo.

zo quotes exactly one single word following it. (Even if that word is one of those compound words like "puzi", it only grabs the "pu" part!)

Non-Lojban — zoi X … X

When you need to quote anything that isn't Lojban at all, you use zoi. You pick any word as a "delimiter" to mark the beginning and end of your quote. (People often just repeat the word "zoi" as the delimiter.)

Indirect speech — du'u / se du'u

do cusku lo se du'u mi prami do kei mi You said that I love you (expressing that particular idea).

Discourse sumti — di'u, di'e, …

These are like pronouns for entire sentences. di'u refers to "that thing I just said," and di'e refers to "the thing I'm about to say."

la'e — “the referent of”

.e'o mi'o zgana la'e zoi py. My Neighbor Totoro py.

le ninmu cu cisma .i mi gleki la'e di'u She smiled; I'm happy about that (specifically, her smiling).

la'o — non-Lojban names with delimiters

.e'o mi'o zgana la'o py. My Neighbor Totoro py.

Exercise

  • Use the word fanva to say: "Translating 'dog' from Japanese to Lojban yields gerku."
  • How would you ask "What is 'dog' in Lojban?" using ma?
fanva
x1 translates text x2 to language x3 from language x4 yielding x5

True or false

Pick whether each statement is true or false according to the lesson.

  1. Lojban has different quotation mechanisms for grammatical text, ungrammatical Lojban, and non‑Lojban material.

  2. The terminator for lu is lu'u.

  3. The terminator for lo'u is le'u.

  4. zo can quote any single Lojban word, including long fused cmavo clusters like bazu.

  5. la .soran. refers to Sora; zo .soran. refers to the name form, not Sora herself.

  6. The anaphora for “the previous utterance” and “the next utterance” are di'e and di'u.

  7. A quoted sumti denotes the text; prefix la'e to refer to what the text denotes.