If I understand {ga'i} correctly, it marks the referent to be of lower
rank. I don't think this is appropriate to mark it as a command.
{ga'i} marks the speaker to be higher rank; {ga'i nai} marks the speaker to be lower rank.
Actually, it marks rank of the speaker compared to the attached thing, which is a subtle distinction.
e.g. {.i lo ga'i gerku cu melbi} has the dog marked as being the thing towards which the speaker feels higher.
Although rank has a connection to the *ability* to give orders, typically, I wouldn't say that using {ga'i} is a *way* to give orders though.
{le'o}, according to jbovlaste is aggressiveness. If the commander
feels the need to be aggressive when giving commands, that hints to
some kind of inner shortcoming, so that he feels he needs to give the
command some additional force to compensate; and that makes it, in my
opinion, not a universal way to mark a "ko-bridi" as a command.
I agree.
I agree too. {le'o} is the kind of thing a store owner would say when kicking you out. The subtext is generally supposed to match up with the text in Lojban, which is why indicators exist.
{e'i} is "feeling constraint" according to jbovlaste. According to the
Merrian-Webster dictionary (sorry, I'm not an English-native),
"constraint" is:
[...]
This seems to be the way the one receiving the command should feel,
not the commander's.
Yes, but the discussion is about whether to redefine (or at least to use dialectically) {e'i} to be more in line with {e'o}, {e'u}, and {e'a}.
In case we're taking votes, I vote in favour of redefining it. Dialectically, it is already used that way by the handful of typical IRC jbopre.