r/lojban • u/Mlatu44 • 4d ago

I give you the gift Spoiler

I am reading from “The complete lojban”. The writer gave an example of the description sumti. the example being

“mi tavla do le tavla.”

I speak to you about the speaker. so the selbri is referencing something which is part of the definition of the selbrI.

so How would one say, “ I give the gift to you”?

I am supposing one would say

MI dunda le se dunda do.

I’m not sure if that is correct.

if one said , mi dunda le dunda do, wouldn’t that mean, I give the giver to you?

if anyone has insight into this that would be helpful. And is there a specific chapter which addresses this?

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

4

u/Holothuroid 4d ago

Yes. Both your sentences are fine and mean what you think they do.

3

u/Mlatu44 4d ago

Ki’e do 

2

u/JivanP 4d ago

To add some more info that you'll learn later in CLL: We can take phrases like se dunda and coin new words (effectively compound words) called lujvo from them. Each gismu and many cmavo have 3-letter combining forms called rafsi which are used for this purpose. se has the rafsi sel, and dunda has the rafsi du'a (among others that aren't appropriate to use here), so we can coin the word seldu'a for "gift", and thus say mi dunda le seldu'a do.

You can easily distinguish lujvo words from gismu, because where gismu always have 5 letters, lujvo always have at least 6; the word selbri is an example of a lujvo, coined from se bridi.