These three variables represent selbri. They are the selbri analogue of {da}, allowing existential and universal claims to be made about predicates.
can someone check this?
For any proposition, there is at least two propositions such that both what we were talking about earlier and at least one of the propositions is true.
This translation needs checked; unsure about the logical connectives here.
This represents an unspecified selbri, that is a selbri whose exact meaning is unimportant/obvious.
doi norsmu li zepamu pi'i rexamu du li xo
Norsmu, what is 715 × 265?
y la cizra du la entrop
Er... Cizra and Entrop is the same person.
ri du ma
"What is [doing what you just said]?''
<xorxes> xu ro cmene be lo gugde ba se vasru la jbovlaste
<Broca> mi troci tu'a lo glico pavbauvlacku
<Broca> a'o go'a
<xorxes> Will all names of countries be in Jbovlaste?
<Broca> I try with an English monolingual dictionary.
<Broca> Hopefully all names of countries will be in Jbovlaste.
na go'e doi tomoj .i mi damba la lindar
No, Tomoj. I'm fighting with Lindar.
.y. mi na go'i .i ku'i ru'a lo samtci na ka'e djica
Uh, I don't. But I presume that a computer program isn't able to want.
do go'ira'o .i ku'i ma na selcnino la lojban
You also do that, but to whom isn't Lojban new?
<djancak> mi nelci lo nu tavla bau la lojban
<gunspoja> go'i ra'o
I like talking in Lojban.
Me too.
xu do go'o .i mi tavla fo la .lojban.
Do you? I talk in Lojban.
mi djuno lo nu do ka'e go'u
I know you're capable of doing that thing somebody said a while ago.
lo su'u do mo cu cinri mi
What are you doing that is interesting to me?
do mo prenu
"What kind of person are you?"
artificial:
.i doi .cmen. do plise vau xu
.i .oi na go'i
Cmen, are you an apple?
Argh, no.
xu do merko
na go'i
mi dotco
Are you American?
No.
I'm German.
du'o nai lo mamta be do mi gletu lo jai du'o nai nei
Unbeknownst to your mother, I had sex with someone who was unaware of it.
ko geirgau le tadni poi na nei ke'a
"Make those students whom you have not made happy, happy."
mi gleki lo nu no'a
"I'm happy about being happy."
le la turnianskis selru'a be fi la lojban zo'u la lojban kulnu nutli gi'e satci fi'o nafmupli fe'u lo nu ly na no'a
Turniansky's postulate about Lojban: Lojban is culturally neutral and exact, with the exception that Lojban isn't.
Can bu'a be "na klama"? That makes things pretty fucking weird; {ro bu'a ro da ro de zo'u da bu'a de .i jo nai da na bu'a de} is not actually true, because "da na klama de" and "da na na klama de" are both true. Do note, however, that {da ja'a bu'a de .i jo nai da na bu'a de} fixes it.
No, of course not. "na" is only syntactically part of the selbri; semantically it applies to the whole bridi. --jcowan
But what happens when bu'a == narbroda? --latros
narbroda is a positive selbri: it is true of exactly those tuples that broda is false of. But in any case, the original claim is bogus: "ro da ro de zo'u da na klama de" is true, because it means "naku ro da ro de zo'u da klama de" (it's true that it is not the case that for every x and every y, x goes to y") and "ro da ro de zo'u da na na klama de" is false, because it means "naku naku ro da ro de zo'u da klama de" which in turn means "ro da ro de klama de", and it is not true that every x goes to every y). So the claim of "pretty fucking weird" seems to me to be incorrect. Multiple consecutive {na} in the selbri cancels out; it's only when you say {na go'i} to a bridi containing {na} that the two are assimilated into just one. This is a magic property of go'V cmavo. --jcowan
There is an issue with bu'a, which also extends to selbri in general to a lesser extent. It is essentially not possible to treat selbri as sumti; that is, to consider a predicate as a predicate logic variable. This is especially relevant to bu'a, because we might want to assert the existence of a predicate which satisfies a certain predicate and is also the selbri of a bridi involving certain terbri. An example when this would be warranted is here. The English sentence "For all stratified predicates P, the set {x : P(x)} exists" ostensibly cannot be translated in the same style; that is, it is apparently not possible to assert that a predicate satisfies a relation in the prenex and then use it as the selbri of a bridi. You can say {ro da poi ke'a selbri gi'e ... zo'u}, and you can say {ro bu'a zo'u}, but you cannot do something that does both things.
{bu'a} is treated weirdly: it's a selbri normally, but in the prenex it is effectively a sumti. The reason this works is that although {ro bu'a} is syntactically a quantifier+sumti-tail type of description, it is taken to mean "for all P". --jcowan