There are two formats for things like addresses, human names, etc.
(1) One format starts at a large (but possibly arbitrary scale) and then zooms in to the smallest relevant scale or member. If there is an ordering '<' on the set (usually a form of containment or membership so that the term on the right-hand side is bigger than the term on the left-hand side), then the string "x1 x2 x3 ... x_(n-1) x_n" implies that x_n < x_(n-1) < ... < x3 x2 < x1. For house addresses, this would be like starting with the country, then specifying the administrative sub-unit, then the local community or metropolitan area, then the city or town, then then district or ward thereof, then the street, then the building number/name, and then the door/apartment label. Computer directory architecture works this way (moving forward in the file location specifies a path through subtrees). Chinese names work this way too: the first name specifies the family, then subsequent names specify subdivisions thereof until the specific/individual/personal name is reached. In taxonomy, this would be going in the order 'domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, subspecies' (or something similar.
(2) Another format is the exact opposite. It starts specific and goes general. "x1 x2 x3 ... x_(n-1) x_n" indicates that x1 < x2 < x3 < ... < x_(n-1) < x_n. U.S. house addresses generally work this way. First is the building and door label (admittedly, understood as a single group but specified in that order), then the steet, then the city or town, then the county, then the state, then the country (with ZIP code breaking the pattern by going at the end). English names also follow this pattern (ignoring middle names and ordinals): the first name is the personal/specific name and the last name is the family name.
Lojban generally seems to adopt strategy (2) because having arbitrarily many sumti for a given order-relation selbri is only practicable if the arbitrary slots begin at the end. If they occurred at the beginning, then figuring out whether the nth sumti (for n > 1) belongs to this ordering relation or is just acting in an entirely different role in the predicate is difficult without additional features in the language or convention. Even context cannot be used because that would make syntactic parsing ambiguous.
However, (1) is a more logical way to operate in many ways, and the choice to go exclusively with (2) in a sense breaks cultural neutrality.
Thus, this word can be used in order to reverse the specification format from (2) to (1) or vice-versa, if the only sumti which ever are mentioned for the given selbri belong only to the ordering terms of the terbri thereof (in other words: are the arbitrary terms).
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