[lojban] Re: "zo'e" for selbri.

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

--- Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/28/05, John E Clifford
> <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > > co'e
> > >
> > That is appropriately unspecified but not
> quite
> > the "obvious or indifferent" force of {zo'e}.
> > Possibly {go'i}, which repeats the previous
> bridi
> > (or, since it can be modified in various ays,
> > selbri) comes closer.  But it is a bit too
> > precise (informative).  Nothing seem to match
> > {zo'e} more exactly -- and we don't have the
> > luxury of a blank (which best matches
> {co'e}).
> 
> A blank selbri is grammatical for the main
> bridi, though
> not for subordinate bridi.

Is it really?  I tried running it through by hand
and could not get it to come down to Sentence,
though it worked for Utterance. 
> 
> {go'i} matches {ri}, and {co'e} matches {zo'e}.
> I'm not 
> sure I understand what you say {co'e} lacks,
> but then we 
> don't seem to agree about {zo'e} in the first
> place anyway 
> so that's not surprizing.
> 
I thought it was blank we disagreed about, but
{zo'e} is a more natural place, since CLL -- and
usage -- have been so contradictory about it. 
CLL says in one place "the obvious value" and in
the next paragraph "a spoken equivalent of a
blank" (or so) and elsewhere "used when it
doesn't matter what is cited" (or so).  It can't
be all of these, obviously, but the first and
last can at least be gathered under the rubric
"no need to name a term."  I suppose that and the
second (obviously) -- and everything else -- is
included under blank, so that might be the best
(though it would immediately screw up your
definitions for {lo} and the like, which require
referential terms -- not that other uses of
{zo'e} are referential either).