First Steps in Lojban

We've covered a lot of ground—simple sentences, tanru, articles, conversion words... I think I'm starting to get the hang of this!

Good! Today we're looking at the FA series. This is mostly a trick for readability and making sentences more compact.

The "FA series"? What's that about?

Example:

Right, we saw that in the previous lesson.

It feels a bit clunky with all those zo'e's, doesn't it?

I guess. But without them, mi klama ti would just mean "I go to this place" (x₂), rather than "using this tool" (x₅).

Exactly! FA words let you assign a following sumti to a specific terbricmi (x₁, x₂, …), no matter where it appears in the sentence:

Oh, so we can just skip all the middle "zo'e" slots by tagging the one we actually want!

Just one thing to keep in mind: Conversion (SE) is always applied before the FA tags. So if you use both, the FA tags count according to the new converted terbri.

(1) I give (something) to you. (2) The man speaks in Lojban. fo puts la .lojban. into the x₄ slot!

Right! And (3) is the real test. Here's the key rule: after you tag a sumti with a FA word, any following untagged sumti just follow in order from that point. They "fall in line."

Okay, let's see. The selbri is ciska (writes). The first sumti is "the child" (x₁). Then we see fi, which puts the yellow paper in x₃. So the next word, pinsi (pencil), must fill x₄!

So: The child writes on yellow paper with a pencil.

Spot on! You just combined articles, tanru, and FA tags all in one go.

I'm on fire!

Naturally!