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

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

>>> Rob Speer <rob@twcny.rr.com> 10/29/01 09:42pm >>>
#On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 02:34:08PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
#> So anyway, it seems the rule for Lojban is that a zo'e x1 cannot be
#> elided.
#
#I rather hope you mean Loglan! I'm rather certain that Lojban does not
#suffer from this flaw.

I meant that an ordinary zo'e cannot be elided from x1 of main bridi,
because covert zo'e in that position leads to the observative interpretation.

#There's lots of usage which shows that a sentence with x1 elided is just
#the same as with any other place elided. As Lojbab said, the only
#difference is that putting the bridi first draws attention to it.
#
#If you want to indicate that some sentence besides a bare bridi is an
#observative, use {za'a}.

I agree. I hope that usage does what you say it does, because it means that the observative convention is sufficiently feeble for it to be readily ignorable.

--And.