Subject: Well I guess you do learn something new every day...

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 02:14:01 -0700 (PDT)

Kudos to Adam Raisen, apologies to Robin Turner, reasonably polite and
understanding beratements to John Cowan, thanks to Iain Alexander,
wild-eyed incomprehension to Bob LeChevalier, and arched eyebrows to the
rest of you for what I've just discovered, as a result of Adam's comments
to my lessons:

http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9708/msg00070.html

Robin was right about {vo'a}, it turns out, and I was wrong. {vo'a}, in
referring to the main bridi rather than the local bridi, does not behave
like most reflexives in the world (which is why I thought we didn't do
it.) There are clear reasons you would want vo'a to do so in Lojban,
though, given that anaphora is more difficult the longer you go, and {ri}
will do just as well as {vo'a} for a local bridi referent, but {ra} is
unmanageable for a main bridi referent out of an abstraction. And
Norwegian and Icelandic, amongst others, do have long-distance reflexives
like this.

Not mentioned in the Ref Grammar at all (in fact, it implies the
opposite), but a 1997 email from Lojbab is enough to confirm to me that
the mystical gloss of {vo'a} in the cmavo list still holds.

And they ask why we need a dictionary...

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
[email-masked] -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias