This is not even close to an “adverb”. “ja'aku” is the same as
“ja'a ku”, simply two structure words (cmavo) which appear in
succession.

Please avoid using terms like “adverbs”, “verbs”, “nouns” when
discussing Lojban, they are often misleading or even just plainly wrong.

Comment #2: Re: adverb?

Alex Burka (Tue Jan 6 04:40:33 2015)

It may be considered an adverb, in that it modifies the predicate's negation status. Do you have a different suggestion that is also concise, but gets the point across as to what this cmavo compound does? There's no need to be so harsh.

Comment #3: Re: adverb? gleki (Tue Jan 6 07:19:08 2015) durka42 wrote: > It may be considered an adverb, in that it modifies the predicate's > negation status. Do you have a different suggestion that is also concise, > but gets the point across as to what this cmavo compound does? There's no > need to be so harsh. The term "adverb" was used here without any references to what this term means. Clearly, this term has to exist. CLL can't help here. BNF/PEG use weird terminology for this.

Comment #4: Re: adverb?

Ilmen (Tue Jan 6 17:51:46 2015)

Wuzzy wrote: > This is not even close to an “adverb”. “ja'aku” is the same as > “ja'a ku”, simply two structure words (cmavo) which appear in > succession. > > Please avoid using terms like “adverbs”, “verbs”, “nouns” when > discussing Lojban, they are often misleading or even just plainly wrong. Well, you're probably right that «ja'aku» is not a word, because ja'a itself can appear in isolation (however "ku" cannot; so is "ku" a word in the linguistic sense?); as a result, «adverbial» is a better term (because «adverb» usually implies that it's a single word). Another option is using a more Lojban-specific terminlogy, such as «non-argument bridi term», «adverbial bridi term», «jbo'adverbi» or «narsumsumsmi». In Lojban, sumtcita clauses, NAku and xoi-clauses are the closest things to adverbials, while sumti are the closest things to noun phrases, as far as I can tell. Using the word "adverbial" for reffering to NAku doesn't seem to me to be much worse than calling "adverbial" or "noun phrase" constructs in other non-Indo-European languages.