If one element of a tanru can be another tanru, why not both elements?

In Example 5.25, the selbri is a tanru with seltau mutce bo barda and tertau gerku bo kavbu. It is worth emphasizing once again that this tanru has the same fundamental ambiguity as all other Lojban tanru: the sense in which the “dog type-of capturer” is said to be “very type-of large” is not precisely specified. Presumably it is his body which is large, but theoretically it could be one of his other properties.

We will now justify the title of this chapter by exploring the ramifications of the phrase “pretty little girls' school”, an expansion of the tanru used in Section 5.3 to four brivla. (Although this example has been used in the Loglan Project almost since the beginning – it first appeared in Quine's book Word and Object (1960) – it is actually a mediocre example because of the ambiguity of English “pretty”; it can mean “beautiful”, the sense intended here, or it can mean “very”. Lojban melbi is not subject to this ambiguity: it means only “beautiful”.)

Here are four ways to group this phrase:

Example 5.29 uses a construction which has not been seen before: cmalu bo nixli bo ckule, with two consecutive uses of bo between brivla. The rule for multiple bo constructions is the opposite of the rule when no bo is present at all: the last two are grouped together. Not surprisingly, this is called the “right-grouping rule”, and it is associated with every use of bo in the language. Therefore,

means the same as Example 5.19, not Example 5.20. This rule may seem peculiar at first, but one of its consequences is that bo is never necessary between the first two elements of any of the complex tanru presented so far: all of Example 5.26 through Example 5.29 could have bo inserted between melbi and cmalu with no change in meaning.