Lojban/Simple sentences with pronouns

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Pronouns are the simplest kind of word you can put in a “place” of a place structure. Here is some vocabulary to get you started:

Lojban English
mi I, me
do you
ti this

So how do we say “I give you this” in Lojban? Easy!

mi dunda ti do
bridi
mi dunda ti do
x1 x2 x3
sumti selbri sumti sumti

Slicing up the grammar

Remember that the Lojban word dunda differs in order from English “give” and the above is more like “I give this to you”. However, Lojban has words for saying which place the following word goes into. Time for some vocabulary again!

Lojban Following word goes in place...
fa first
fe second
fi third
fo fourth
fu fifth

You might notice there is a pattern to these words. They obviously all start with an “f”, but also, the ending vowels are in alphabetical order.

Now we can say the sentence with the same order as in English.

mi dunda fi do fe ti

This might seem a little clumsy, and these words are rarely used in this way. They are usually used to skip places, leaving some information up to guessing from context. We could say “I give you something”:

mi dunda fi do

Lojbanists call these words “place tags” as they “tag” a place.