[lojban] go'i as "yes"

[Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>]

So someone in IRC was asking how to respond "yes" or "no" to a question in lojban and it got me thinking about a lack of knowledge on my part that has been bothering me for some time now.

If you see the following:

A:  xu la .bob. zvati

B:  go'i

You would interpret the {go'i} as {la .bob. zvati}.  But if you see the following:

A:  ti'e la .bob. zvati

B:  go'i

Would you read that as {me too} or {yes, you heard right.  He is here}.

What I'm getting at is, {go'i} clearly does not simply repeat all the words of the last bridi or else {xu do broda .i go'i} would expand to {xu do broda .i xu do broda}.  So is it just discursives that get dropped?  I think I remember hearing xorxes at one point say something like "go'i repeats the bridi and any left off places are defaulted to those of the previous bridi".  But then, are discursives "left off but NOT defaulted to those of the previous bridi"?

If I were writing a program to parse lojban, how should my parser deal with a piece of discourse that contained {go'i} if it wanted to expand everything?

i.e. given the following bridi

.i ti'e .u'i la .bob. noi lazni cu zvati to pe'i cinri toi ma

How does {go'i} differ syntactically and semantically from {zo'e zvati zo'e}

Sorry for the stupidly long email.

mi'e cribe

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