Re: [lojban] observatives & a construal of lo'e & le'e

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/31/2001 10:06:38 AM Central Standard Time, arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes:

Treating the observative as a special case is precisely what I object to.
If it is not treated as a special case then there is no observative convention;
there is just the one rule for interpreting zo'e reagrdless of its environment
and of whether it is elided. I don't want there to be an observative
convention; I want there to be just the single general rule. This thread
began by my asking whether there really was this observative convention,
since I had thought there was just the single general rule.

You have it backwards.  Someone, years ago, asked "How do we do observatives?"  (or words to that a effect -- probably, "How do you yell 'Fire' in a burning theater in Loglan?") and that set us off looking for a good answer.  Loglan never did really get a good one for all cases, Lojban did.  But notice what the convention is: "observatieves are x1-less bridi," not "x1-less bridi are observatives".  That is , here is how to do, when you want, not, if you do this that is what you are stuck with.  To be sure, since (at least in the contextless world of examples) subjectless sentences don't often occur otherwise, we tend to take them as observatives.  But in other contexts, other uses make more sense sometimes.