Lojbanic Pronouns

A tangent from MalGlico. What are the pronouns in LojbanLanguage like?

miKOhAmi-seriesI, me doKOhAmi-seriesyou mi'oKOhAmi-seriesyou and I mi'aKOhAmi-seriesI and others, we but not you ma'aKOhAmi-seriesyou and I and others do'oKOhAmi-seriesyou and others koKOhAmi-seriesyou-imperative

This is beautiful, and I think justifies the existence of Lojban more than anything else. :)

Not exactly. The cmavo list defines "mi" as "me/we the speaker(s)/author(s)". "mi'o" is essentially the same as "mi joi do"; it's just a handy shortcut, and the same with the others. I suppose you don't agree here, but I've always thought that using "mi'o", "mi'a", etc. to mark the 1st person plural was mildly malglico, i.e. insisting on marking number just because English does.

Certainly marking it thus when it's obvious from context might be malglico, but there are occasions when it is not clear whether one speaks for oneself or a group. .iesai

Lots of languages distinguish between singular and plural persons, even if they don't normally distinguish numbers, like Chinese. Otherwise they're hard to disambiguate - one of the problems with English is that it doesn't always keep them apart, as in ThouVsYou, diminishing the precision of the language. Lojban seems to be difficult in this respect too - even the mi in mi'o could be plural [theoretically, but then we use ma'a. Mi has always been singular.]. Why would you want to lose resolution like that? Is the Lojban community automatically afraid of any grammar or vocabulary that happens to be used in English, regardless of its merit?

Yes, EnglishIsEvil?, and our noble goal is that eventually not only will English not be spoken, but all grammatical structures ever used in English will be completely erased and forgotten by everyone. The world would be a much better place if people would stop using English.

Actually, LojbanLanguage just simply tries to derive itself from its own principles, and not to copy features from other languages, and Lojban doesn't explicitly distinguish number in other parts of the language, so its more internally consistent not to with the personal pronouns, either.

Is there a you-and-others-imperative form, as opposed to you-singular? I guess it'd be ko'o. Am I right?

There should also be a you-and-I imperative, thinking about it. English uses "let us", which is a subjunctive rather than a true imperative, but German has one (Gehen wir) and it seems like a good idea.

No, ko'o is a word for he, she, it, or whatever else you want it to be. In practice, imperatives in Lojban can be done using attitudinal indicators, instead of ko, and the "do'o" imperative, as well as imperatives for any other pronoun, can be made by analogy to these. For example, ko klama is "go!", but is also basically equivalent to "ei do klama" (like "you must go", but expressing an emotion, instead of stating a fact), and so therefore "ei mi'o klama" can be used for "let's go", etc. There are also other words which express emotions if obligation isn't the exact kind of imperative you're looking for.

But there is precedent that the AttitudinalIndicator e'o, the most common imperative one since it basically means 'please,' needs a ko. Without being a command it doesn't make much sense, but LLG's translation of 'Please support Lojban' is '.i .e'osai ko sarji la lojban.' rather than '.i .e'osai do sarji la lojban.' It is therefore reasonable to assume commands need ko. How about this:

 do'o klama le zarci = y'all go to the store.
 bai ko do'o klama le zarci = make 'bai do do'o klama le zarci' true.
 bai do do'o klama le zarci = impelled by you (singular), y'all go to the market.

Or maybe we need to assign an experimental cmavo to make imperatives without ko. I'll go suggest it on the LojbanLanguage wiki.

Also: redo, you two, cido, you three, etc., with rodo (all of you) being most common become reko, ciko, roko as command forms. we still need a 'let's' form. One is being discussed on the lojban mailing list: xu'a, which would work like xu but make commands rather than questions. (xu changes a bridi from an assertion to a true or false question, xu'a would make it an imperative.)

A solution exists. The cmavo doi sets the value of do, ko commands the current value of do, so the answer is doi do'o ko klama le zarci for the example above. Let's go is doi mi'o ko klama. Kudos to Jay Kominek, who figured this out.