The Complete Lojban Language
where the tag pu forces the sentence to refer to a time in the past. Similarly,
- Example 2.91
| la djan. | ca | klama | le zarci |
| John | [present] | goes | to-the store |
necessarily refers to the present, because of the tag ca. Tags used in this way always appear at the very beginning of the selbri, just after the cu, and they may make a cu unnecessary, since tags cannot be absorbed into tanru. Such tags serve as an equivalent to English tenses and adverbs. In Lojban, tense information is completely optional. If unspecified, the appropriate tense is picked up from context.
Lojban also extends the notion of “tense” to refer not only to time but to space. The following example uses the tag vu to specify that the event it describes happens far away from the speaker:
- Example 2.92
| do | vu vecnu | zo'e |
| You | yonder sell | something-unspecified. |
In addition, tense tags (either for time or space) can be prefixed to the selbri of a description, producing a tensed sumti:
- Example 2.93
| le pu bajra | [ku] | cu | tavla |
| The earlier/former/past runner | - | - | talked/talks. |
(Since Lojban tense is optional, we don't know when he or she talks.)
Tensed sumti with space tags correspond roughly to the English use of “this” or “that” as adjectives, as in the following example, which uses the tag vi meaning “nearby”:
- Example 2.94
| le vi bajra | [ku] | cu | tavla |
| The nearby runner | - | - | talks. |
- This runner talks.
Do not confuse the use of vi in Example 2.94 (p. 30) with the cmavo ti, which also means “this”, but in the sense of “this thing”.
Furthermore, a tense tag can appear both on the selbri and within a description, as in the following example (where ba is the tag for future time):
- Example 2.95
| le vi tavla | [ku] | cu | ba klama |
| The here talker | - | - | [future] goes. |
- The talker who is here will go.
- This talker will go.
2.18 Lojban grammatical terms
Here is a review of the Lojban grammatical terms used in this chapter, plus some others used throughout this book. Only terms that are themselves Lojban words are included: there are of course many expressions like “indicator” in Chapter 16 (p. 375) that are not explained here. See the Index for further help with these.
| bridi | predication; the basic unit of Lojban expression; the main kind of Lojban sentence; a claim that some objects stand in some relationship, or that some single object has some property. |
| sumti | argument; words identifying something which stands in a specified relationship to something else, or which has a specified property. See Chapter 6 (p. 115). |
| selbri | logical predicate; the core of a bridi; the word or words specifying the relationship between the objects referred to by the sumti. See Chapter 5 (p. 79). |
