The following cmavo are discussed in this section:

The cmavo to and toi are discursive (non-mathematical) parentheses, for inserting parenthetical remarks. Any text whatsoever can go within the parentheses, and it is completely invisible to its context. It can, however, refer to the context by the use of pro-sumti and pro-bridi: any that have been assigned in the context are still assigned in the parenthetical remarks, but the reverse is not true.

Example 19.66 implicitly redefines do within the parentheses: the listener is changed by doi .frank. When the context sentence resumes, however, the old listener, Lisa, is automatically restored.

There is another cmavo of selma'o TO: to'i . The difference between to and to'i is the difference between parentheses and square brackets in English prose. Remarks within to ... toi cmavo are implicitly by the same speaker, whereas remarks within to'i ... toi are implicitly by someone else, perhaps an editor:

The sa'a suffix is a discursive cmavo (of selma'o UI) meaning “editorial insertion” , and indicating that the marked word or construct (in this case, the entire bracketed remark) is not part of the quotation. It is required whenever the to'i ... toi remark is physically within quotation marks, at least when speaking to literal-minded listeners; the convention may be relaxed if no actual confusion results.

Note: The parser believes that parentheses are attached to the previous word or construct, because it treats them as syntactic equivalents of subscripts and other such so-called “free modifiers” . Semantically, however, parenthetical remarks are not necessarily attached either to what precedes them or what follows them.

The cmavo sei (of selma'o SEI) begins an embedded discursive bridi. Comments added with sei are called “metalinguistic” , because they are comments about the discourse itself rather than about the subject matter of the discourse. This sense of the term “metalinguistic” is used throughout this chapter, and is not to be confused with the sense “language for expressing other languages” .

When marked with sei , a metalinguistic utterance can be embedded in another utterance as a discursive. In this way, discursives which do not have cmavo assigned in selma'o UI can be expressed:

Using the happiness attitudinal, .ui , would imply that the speaker was happy. Instead, the speaker attributes happiness to Frank. It would probably be safe to elide the one who is happy, and say:

The grammar of the bridi following sei has an unusual limitation: the sumti must either precede the selbri, or must be glued into the selbri with be and bei :

This restriction allows the terminator cmavo se'u to almost always be elided.

Since a discursive utterance is working at a “higher” level of abstraction than a non-discursive utterance, a non-discursive utterance cannot refer to a discursive utterance. Specifically, the various back-counting, reciprocal, and reflexive constructs in selma'o KOhA ignore the utterances at “higher” metalinguistic levels in determining their referent. It is possible, and sometimes necessary, to refer to lower metalinguistic levels. For example, the English “he said” in a conversation is metalinguistic. For this purpose, quotations are considered to be at a lower metalinguistic level than the surrounding context (a quoted text cannot refer to the statements of the one who quotes it), whereas parenthetical remarks are considered to be at a higher level than the context.

Lojban works differently from English in that the “he said” can be marked instead of the quotation. In Lojban, you can say:

which literally claims that John uttered the quoted text. If the central claim is that John made the utterance, as is likely in conversation, this style is the most sensible. However, in written text which quotes a conversation, you don't want the “he said” or “she said” to be considered part of the conversation. If unmarked, it could mess up the anaphora counting. Instead, you can use:

And of course other orders are possible:

Note the sa'a following each sei , marking the sei and its attached bridi as an editorial insert, not part of the quotation. In a more relaxed style, these sa'a cmavo would probably be dropped.

The elidable terminator for sei is se'u (of selma'o SEhU); it is rarely needed, except to separate a selbri within the sei comment from an immediately following selbri (or component) outside the comment.