sa'ei

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sa'ei COI expressive/ideophone ("kapow! kerrang!")
(proposed by AndR) describes a sound
  • Actually the idea is that it would work like expressives & ideophones in natlangs, such that it doesn't necessarily describe a sound, but uses sound to describe metaphorically. [[mi'e [jbocre: And|And]]
  • It may be more useful as converting cmene to interjections - which has all the same uses but also allows sa'ei. djig. as an invocation of the Loglanic god Jeeg, or perhaps sa'ei. xux. as an invocation of the god of sneezes. Also sa'ei. kalc. to mean oh crap (which would be malglico, but I'm to lacy to think of a better example) would be allowed under that interpretation. - mi'e. .kreig.daniyl.
  • Craig, that is ki'ai. It was proposed at the same time as sa'ei. And Rosta
    • The last time I read the ki'ai page, it seemed to be more like an attitudinal. And the one "usage" of it is just the bare word ki'ai, so I didn't realize.

I haven't seen an example of this in use, so I'll take a guess that it works like this:

.i sa'ei .bam. le bolci pu darxi mi di'o le stedu trixe

Bam! The ball hit me in the back of the head.

For more flexible sound-words, fu'ivla starting with "sancr" were proposed (in a mailing list message from a while ago):

.i le bolci pu sancrxuame mi di'o le stedu trixe

The ball whammed me in the back of the head.

    • Fine. But sa'ei is more like Wham! The ball hit me in the back of the head. Fuhivla are truthconditional, nonhomonymous and have conventionalized meaning. Cmene are nontruthconditional, homonymous and not necessarily conventionalized. So fuhivla are no substitute for sa'ei. -- mi'e And Rosta.
    • Note that there must be a pause between sa'ei and the cmene, since cmene must be (phonologically) preceded by la, lai, la'i, doi,

or pause. I have added a dot to the example.


Using sa'ei like that would break the grammar unless you stick it in those cumbersome "zoi gy."Why? sa'ei is COI and so can be followed by a cmene.


But using a stage 3 fu'ivla is actually a beautiful idea! Importing a word in from the language of noises and sounds! Sweet! The only problem is that you need a very strong Lojbanic intuition to be able to do onomatopeia (sp?) instantly, but avoiding "la" and other illegal noises.

That would be a problem with sa'ei and not with sancr-; I'm not aware of any restriction on "la" in fu'ivla.


At Logfest 2001, there was some discussion that doi works for this (as evocation).

  • How?
    • Hmm, I may be confused. Anyone else who was there?