Adjunctions

There are several spots where Lojban has adjoint operators.

Abstractor adjunction: {jai},

The general idea is {da jai broda} <=> {tu'a da broda}.

Mekso adjunction: {na'u},

{na'u} sends mekso operators to selbri, and {nu'a} sends selbri to mekso operators. In both cases, arity is implied.

We get several rules from this. First, for selbri like {sumji}, we have a bijective correspondence between the selbri and the operator:

ro da ro de ro di zo'u:

  da sumji de di
================== (su'i-na'u)
da na'u su'i de di

And since it's a bijection for each individual operator, we get a cancellation rule as well:

ro bu'a zo'u:

na'u nu'a bu'a
============== (na'u-adj)
     bu'a

Note that there's additional structure here which we'll have to explain in mekso; {su'i} is n-ary (binary minimum?) but {sumji} is always binary.

Table of VUhU operators and selbri

operatorselbri
su'isumji
pi'ipilji
vu'use sumji
fe'ise pilji
fa'ise pilji fe li pa
te'atenfa
geika su'o da zo'u ge da tenfa ce'u ce'u gi ce'u pilji ce'u da
ge'acei'i
de'odugri
fe'ase tenfa
va'ase sumji fe li no

Not listed:

  • cu'a
  • ju'u
  • ne'o
  • pa'i
  • re'a
  • pi'a
  • sa'i