First Steps in Lojban

Next, let's look at how we can manipulate our selbri—which, in practice, opens up a whole new set of tricks for our sumti.

Manipulation, huh? Sounds like we're getting into the advanced stuff!

It’s actually very intuitive. The SE series of words can be attached to a selbri to swap its x₁ slot with one of the others (x₂, x₃, x₄, or x₅).

"Swap"? How does that work in practice?

Example with klama:

I see! So se swaps places 1 and 2, te swaps 1 and 3, and so on.

Exactly. These conversion words don't change the underlying meaning—they just change the perspective of the sentence.

Is it really worth the extra words?

Definitely! For one thing, if you only care about a recipient or a tool and don't care about the giver or the user, it saves you from having to use a bunch of zo'e:

Hmm, I guess that is cleaner.

But the real magic happens when you combine it with lo! This lets you turn any place slot into a description or title:

Whoa, that's a huge power-up for our descriptions!

Oh, I get it now! That's what you meant by "widening sumti tricks."

Bingo. Whenever you're stuck, just remember: with se/te/ve/xe, you can use lo to extract any slot from x₂ to x₅.