sumti

English

Etymology

From Lojban.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈsuːm.ti/

Noun

sumti (plural sumti)

1. (Lojban grammar) an argument passed to a selbri (“predicate”)
   • 1993, M. Gunderloy, Factsheet Five - Issues 49-53, page 43:

     Focusing on artificial languages and Lojban in particular. News, state of the language, tutorials, poetry, cleft place structures, and sumti-raising with other long debates on how to construct a sentence in Lojban.

   • 1997, JW Cowan, The complete Lojban language, page 13:

     Names may also be used as sumti provided they are preceded with the word "la".

   • 2000, Alan Libert, Languages of the World - Issues 24-27, page 114:

     The LRG (ibid.) says, "Usually, placing more than one sumti [argument] before the selbri [predicator] is done for style or for emphasis on the sumti that are out-of-place from their normal position. (Native speakers of languages other than English may prefer such orders.)"

   • 2004, Binh Nguyen, Linux Dictionary, page 845:

     Showing which sumti fill each of the places of each selbri From Debian

2. (Lojban grammar) a parameter ("place") in a selbri (“predicate”)'s "place structure", which can be filled with an argument (sumti (“argument”) in the above sense)
   • 1997, JW Cowan, The complete Lojban language, page 12:

     The simplest kind of selbri consists of a single root word, called a "gismu", and the definition in a dictionary gives the place structure explicitly. The primary task of constructing a Lojban sentence, after choosing the relationship itself, is decideing what you will use to fill in the sumti places.

   • 2002 March 3, Nick Nicholas, “Folk Functionalism in Artificial Languages: The Long Distance Reflexive vo á in Lojban”, in Journal of Universal Language, page 153:

     In counting sumtifor voá series anaphora, you are concerned only with the sumti (and not modal/tense operators) of the main bridi of an utterance, as they are formally defined.

   • 2005, Brandon Wirick, Lojban as a Tool for Encoding Prose on the Semantic Web (Masters Thesis, California Polytechnic State University), page 50:

     The high-level parser then converts that string into XML and traverses it, organizing its sumti into data structures.

Holonyms

• bridi (“sentence/predication”)

Derived terms

• pro-sumti
• sumti tcita i.e.: sumtcita (“preposition/extra sumti tag”)

Anagrams

• UMIST, musit, mutis, tuism, tumis