Subject: Re: [lojban] observatives & a construal of lo'e & le'e

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 12:23:00 +0000

Okay. Fine. This all makes sense & is Right & Proper & as it should be.

--And.

>>> <[email-masked]> 11/01/01 01:25am >>>
In a message dated 10/31/2001 10:06:38 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Treating the observative as a special case is precisely what I object to.
> If it is not treated as a special case then there is no observative 
> convention;
> there is just the one rule for interpreting zo'e reagrdless of its 
> environment
> and of whether it is elided. I don't want there to be an observative
> convention; I want there to be just the single general rule. This thread 
> began by my asking whether there really was this observative convention,
> since I had thought there was just the single general rule.
> 

You have it backwards. Someone, years ago, asked "How do we do 
observatives?" (or words to that a effect -- probably, "How do you yell 
'Fire' in a burning theater in Loglan?") and that set us off looking for a 
good answer. Loglan never did really get a good one for all cases, Lojban 
did. But notice what the convention is: "observatieves are x1-less bridi," 
not "x1-less bridi are observatives". That is , here is how to do, when you 
want, not, if you do this that is what you are stuck with. To be sure, since 
(at least in the contextless world of examples) subjectless sentences don't 
often occur otherwise, we tend to take them as observatives. But in other 
contexts, other uses make more sense sometimes.