First Steps in Lojban

So far I've been collecting cmavo like pocket lint: lo, le, nu, be, poi, noi, cu, ko'a, fa, se … they're everywhere. Is there any system?

Yes! Each cmavo belongs to a selma'o — a syntactic subcategory. Words in the same selma'o behave identically in terms of grammar: you can swap them out without causing a parse error (though the meaning changes, of course).

And what's the selma'o called?

Each selma'o is named after one of its representative members, written in capitals. For example:

• The article class (the "sumti-former" cmavo like lo, le, la …) is called LE.
• The tense class (time-distance markers like zi, za, zu …) is called ZI.
• The abstractors like nu, du'u, ka … are the NU class.
• The selbri negation cmavo na, ja'a are the NA class.

You've actually already been using these names! SE for se/te/ve/xe, FA for fa/fe/fi/fo/fu, COI for coi/co'o/ki'e…

Oh — that's why Koshon kept saying "SE class" and "FA class." They were just giving me the selma'o names all along!

Exactly. The names aren't invented arbitrarily — they're always the simplest or most common member of the class, uppercased. You can find them in any Lojban dictionary next to each cmavo entry.

Within a selma'o, any member can replace any other and the sentence will stay grammatical. Only the meaning differs:

All three are in LE selma'o, so they all "work" in the same grammatical slot — just with different references.

Right. Same slot, different meaning. That's exactly what selma'o tracks.

One caution: "article" in the English-grammar sense doesn't map perfectly onto any single selma'o. What English calls articles spans multiple Lojban classes. Selma'o is strictly about syntactic behavior, not English grammatical terms.

Some selma'o are large enough to sub-divide by meaning. The convention is to append a number to the selma'o name:

• KOhA1 — personal pronouns: mi, do, mi'o, mi'a …
• KOhA2 — demonstratives: ti, ta, tu
• KOhA3 — reflexive/anaphoric: ri, ra, ru, ko'a, fo'a …

All of these are still KOhA (same grammar), but the sub-number tells you which semantic cluster they belong to.

So the big picture is: selma'o tells you the grammar, the number tells you the meaning flavour.

Nicely put. And if you ever want to really map out Lojban's grammar systematically, going through the major selma'o one by one is a great approach. It also helps you notice when you're missing vocabulary — you might know the NU abstractors nu and du'u but realize you've never seen si'o or ni.

I know all of those! I just didn't know they had names.

Now you do. And whenever you encounter a new cmavo in the wild, your dictionary will tell you its selma'o — which instantly tells you how to use it, even before you know what it means.