Cursor — AI code editor
Cursor is my main AI coding tool. If you were going to try it anyway, this referral gives new accounts 50% off the first month of Pro, Pro+, or Ultra (per Cursor’s current offer).
Example
Lojban interlinear gloss with sumti placeholders
Lojban washing sentence with x1–x4 placeholders: a logical-language structure aligned to English.
Example layout based on an example in the Wikipedia article Interlinear gloss (illustrative; Leipzig-style conventions).
What this example shows
Lojban is a constructed logical language. The sentence mi lumci le creka le grasu le rirxe means “I wash the grease off the shirt in the river”. Each noun phrase fills a numbered slot in the verb’s place structure, and the gloss labels those slots x1 through x4. The example is a way to teach how Lojban arranges arguments.
Filling the place structure
The verb lumci defines slots, and each le phrase fills one:
- mi I (x1)
- The first argument, the washer.
- lumci wash
- The verb, which defines a place structure with several numbered slots.
- le creka the shirt (x2)
- The thing washed. le is the article that introduces a noun phrase.
- le grasu the grease (x3)
- What is washed off.
- le rirxe the river (x4)
- Where the washing happens.
Slots instead of word order
In English, the role of a noun comes partly from its position and partly from prepositions like “off” and “in”. In Lojban, the verb’s place structure assigns each noun a numbered role, so the gloss can label them x1 to x4 directly. The repeated le marks each new argument, where English varies between “the”, “off the”, and “in the”. The alignment shows which English words carry the roles that Lojban states by position in the place structure.
Glossing a constructed language
Numbered placeholders like x1 are a teaching convention for Lojban rather than a standard Leipzig tag, and they sit comfortably in the same gloss line. For the grammatical labels that do follow the standard set, such as a determiner tag for le, the usual list applies.
For the standard labels:
Recreate it in the editor
Open the example and reuse it as a template for teaching place structure in Lojban or another constructed language. Add a custom font under Settings → Fonts for an invented script, then export the diagram as PNG, SVG, or PDF.
See also
Related examples:
- Classical Nahuatl word-by-word shows a verb that packs in its arguments.
- Turkish infinitive gloss is a minimal two-line template.
Open Cursor