Chapter 7: Brevity Is The Soul Of Language: Pro-sumti And Pro-bridi

15. lujvo based on pro-sumti

There exist rafsi allocated to a few cmavo of selma'o KOhA, but they are rarely used. (See c7-§16 for a complete list.) The obvious way to use them is as internal sumti, filling in an appropriate place of the gismu or lujvo to which they are attached; as such, they usually stand as the first rafsi in their lujvo.

Thus “donta'a”, meaning “you-talk”, would be interpreted as “tavla be do”, and would have the place structure

✥15.1    t1 talks to you about subject t3 in language t4

since t2 (the addressee) is already known to be “do”.

On the other hand, the lujvo “donma'o”, literally “you-cmavo”, which means “a second person personal pronoun”, would be interpreted as “cmavo be zo do”, and have the place structure:

✥15.2    c1 is a second person pronoun in language c4

since both the c2 place (the grammatical class) and the c3 place (the meaning) are obvious from the context “do”.

An anticipated use of rafsi for cmavo in the “fo'a” series is to express terjvo which can't be expressed in a convenient rafsi form, because they are too long to express, or are formally inconvenient (fu'ivla, cmene, and so forth.) An example would be:

✥15.3    fo'a goi le kulnrsu,omi .i lo fo'arselsanga
x6 stands for Finnish-culture.  An x6-song

Finally, lujvo involving “zi'o” are also possible, and are fully discussed in Chapter 12. In brief, the convention is to use the rafsi for “zi'o” as a prefix immediately followed by the rafsi for the number of the place to be deleted. Thus, if we consider a beverage (something drunk without considering who, if anyone, drinks it) as a “se pinxe be zi'o”, the lujvo corresponding to this is “zilrelselpinxe” (deleting the second place of “se pinxe”). Deleting the x1 place in this fashion would move all remaining places up by one. This would mean that “zilpavypinxe” has the same place structure as “zilrelselpinxe”, and “lo zilpavypinxe”, like “lo zilrelselpinxe”, refers to a beverage, and not to a non-existent drinker.

The pro-bridi “co'e”, “du”, and “bu'a” also have rafsi, which can be used just as if they were gismu. The resulting lujvo have (except for “du”-based lujvo) highly context-dependent meanings.