[lojban] Re: Exact translation of the pronoun "we"

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

-- Yanis Batura <ybatura@mail.ru> wrote:

> Dear Lojbanists,
> 
> is there an EXACT translation of English
> pronoun "we"
> (the semantics of which is something like:
> me, the speaker, and AT LEAST one other person
> somehow related to me)?

More importantly, somehow related to the present
conversation situation: as cospeaker, listener, 
topic, or bystander. English "we" does not
distinguish among the possible accompaniers of
me: listeners alone, third parties alone, or both
second and third parties.  The closest is
probably {ma'a} which takes in both second and
third parties.  It would work if we allowed that
one or the other of these might reduce to 0 (a
not unheard of kind of case). Or the "and" be
treated as "or".

> neither mi, nor mi'e do fit:
> 
> mi        
> KOhA3    
> me
> pro-sumti: me/we the speaker(s)/author(s);
> identified by self-vocative
> 
> mi'a
> KOhA3
> we, not you
> pro-sumti: me/we the speaker(s)/author(s) &
> others unspecified, but not you, the listener
> 
> 
> we can see from these definitions that both mi
> and mi'a could mean "me", which is far from
> what "we" means :)



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