English Translation
I answered the question.
“Mi pu spuda le preti” is a sentence in the constructed language Lojban. Lojban is designed to have an unambiguous grammar, which can be appealing to people interested in logic, mathematics, and computer science. Let’s break down the sentence:
- Mi: The first person singular pronoun, similar to “I” in English.
- pu: A tense marker that indicates the past; it is used to place an event in the past relative to the present moment.
- spuda: The verb (or selbri in Lojban), which means “to respond” or “to answer.”
- le: A determiner, similar to “the” in English, used here to indicate a specific referent that the listener can identify.
- preti: A noun (or gismu in Lojban), meaning “question.”
Putting it all together, “mi pu spuda le preti” can be translated as “I responded to the question” or “I answered the question,” with the emphasis on the action taking place in the past.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the sentence structure:
- The subject “mi” comes at the beginning of the sentence. In Lojban, the order of elements is generally more flexible than in English due to particle usage (like “cu” to separate the subject from the selbri when necessary), but here the default order without particles is subject-verb-object, much like English.
- The tense marker “pu” follows the subject to immediately indicate that the following action took place in the past.
- “spuda” is the main verb of the sentence—what the subject is doing.
- “le” comes before “preti” to specify which question is being talked about. In this case, “le” implies that the listener knows which question is being referred to.
- “preti” is the object of the verb “spuda.”
In summary, the grammar of Lojban allows you to decode and understand sentences like “mi pu spuda le preti” with precision, helping to minimize ambiguity in communication.