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From: John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: [lojban] Re: {le} and {lo}.
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--- Opi Lauma <opi_lauma@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I try to understand the usage of {le} and {lo}.
> The
> analogy with English articles “the” and “a/an”
> does
> not help me to much since I am not native
> English
> speaker.
> 
> However, I think that I understood the usage of
> {le}.
> Actually {le X} means that I speak about some
> earlier
> selected (defined) subset of elements from set
> X, for
> example: 
> 
> 1. le gerku - the dog(s)
> (one speaks about dog(s) which has/have been
> defined
> earlier).
> 
> 2. ci le gerku - three of the dogs
> (one speaks about some three (it is not known
> which
> three exactly) dogs from earlier defined group
> of
> dogs).
> 
> 3. le ci gerku - the three dogs
> (one speaks about the three earlier defined
> dogs).
> 
> 4. re le ci gerku
> (one speaks about some two dogs, from earlier
> defined
> group consisting of three dogs).
> I think that it is no use to say the two dogs
> of the
> three dogs {le re le ci gerku}, since if we
> know which
> two dogs it is spoken about, we do not need to
> know to
> which group of dogs these two dogs belong. Did
> I
> correctly understand everything? 
> 
> About {lo}. Is it right that {lo gerku} = {le N
> gerku}, where N is a number of all {gerku} in
> the
> world?
>  
Your {le} looks right, though I think {le re le
ci gerku} does have occasional use (like all
double articled forms, it is relatively rare -- I
can hear someone pointing out that it occrs  X
times a passage).
{lo gerku} is open to some discussion but I don't
think that anyone identifies it with all the dogs
there are in a simple way.  It is either some
uspecified bunch of dogs or all the dogs taken
disjunctively distributed, which amounts
non-linguistically to the same thing: "some dogs"
rather than "all dogs."