[lojban] Re: le duX

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Adam D. Lopresto:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, And Rosta wrote:
>
> > The original question can be reposed as: What fills the gap in the
> > following pattern?
> >
> > go'a-series  : ra-series
> > broda-series : ko'a-series
> > bu'a-series  : da-series
> > co'e         : ???????
>
> The answer to that is obviously zo'e.

Either that obvious answer is incorrect, or else I have misunderstood the
nature of co'e, and posed the question erroneously.

zo'e can be replaced by any sumti, indubitably including ke'a and da, and
-- perhaps, pending the BF's ruling -- by zi'o. Now, can co'e be replaced
by any brivla, such as an unbound bu'a?

> So I ask again, what's so terribly wrong with zo'e?

The "?????" in the paradigm ranges across all possible referents; the hearer
glorks which is intended. zo'e ranges across all possible grammatical sumti
-- including referentless ones like da, ce'u, zi'o.

The "???" is like English "it". "It moved me" cannot be truthconditionally
equivalent to "I moved" (as if "it" = zi'o) or "Everything moved me" (as if
"it" = roda).

I had assumed that co'e ranges across all possible relations, not across
all possible grammatical selbri. But I may be wrong; it may be that co'e
is indeed the counterpart of zo'e, in which case the question was wrongly
reposed.

> That's what's bugging me with this whole conversation.  "le du"
> instantly raises for me the question "le du ma" and of course the only
answer,
> since we're missing an argument, is "le du zo'e".  So why use le du zo'e
> instead of zo'e?

Because "le du be zo'e" would rewrite to "le du be da" or "le du be <sumti
equivalent of no'a>" (i.e. le du poi ke'a du ke'a). "le du" (or le +
anything)
has a narrower range of possible interpretations than "zo'e".

--And.