Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Let's do something like this for Lojban!

[Felipe Gonçalves Assis <felipeg.assis@gmail.com>]

[On the relation between 3rd person pronouns, demonstratives and the
ko'a-series]

There is an important example of a natural language that has no personal pronoun
for the 3rd person, i.e., Classical Latin, in which demonstratives
haec, ista, illa, etc
were used instead. In fact, it is from these demonstratives that 3rd
person personal
pronouns developed, in romance languages at least (taking their form
from ille/illa).

It is indeed as demonstratives of people that 3rd person personal
pronouns behave.
I can point to a girl and refer to her as "she", or refer to a guy
nearby mentioned in
the text as "he". These vague but noticeable rules of reference give
rise to the lojbo
ti-series and ri-series respectively.

The ko'a-series is a whole different thing. Its single rule of
reference is assignment.
The only parallel to that in the English language is the "henceforth
referred to as"
of legal documents, which does not include personal pronouns at all.

So, while the CLL does comment that the ko'a-series is the lojban version of 3rd
person pronouns, this is pretty insensitive to how natural languages work.

mu'o
mi'e .asiz.

On 3 March 2012 21:29, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Remo Dentato <rdentato@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 12:10 AM, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I disagree. ko'a - vo'u are Lojban's he, she, and it. Unlike most
>> > languages,
>> > we get 8 of them, and they're all gender neutral. ko'a-vo'u aren't
>> > pointing
>> > words, they refer to a specific entity, which may be explicitly made
>> > using
>> > goi, or implicitly assigned from context.
>>
>> I disagree here. While I'm a great support of "meaning by context", on
>> his own {ko'a} has no meaning and can't be used the same way the third
>> person is used in English and other languages.
>

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