From cowan Mon Aug 24 11:21:00 1992 Subject: Re: gadri To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) From: John Cowan Date: Mon, 24 Aug 92 11:21:00 EDT In-Reply-To: <9208210912.AA07379@relay1.UU.NET>; from "oasis.icl.co.uk!I.Alexander.bra0122" at Aug 21, 92 10:05 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Status: RO Message-ID: la .i,n cusku di'e > {le cukta} means > "the-thing-which-I-am-describing-as-a book", but with the > rider that I don't feel the need to be more specific, because > I expect you to know from the context which book I am talking > about. This is an alternative way of referring to previously- > mentioned sumti, without always assigning a KOhA. Not necessarily. When I talk of "le cukta", the context for figuring out which book may be extra-linguistic. There is no reason to assume that I have necessarily mentioned this book before. In fact, we recently introduced the particle "bi'u" to distinguish between old and new information: "lebi'u cukta" is a newly mentioned book. > Note that this makes the specific/definite descriptions > ambiguous. When I use {le}, I _am_ referring to something > specific, *but I'm not specifying it now*. It is something > which has been specified earlier. Or not. "le vi cukta" may be just "this book here in my hand" even if I have not >mentioned< the book before -- I still expect you to figure out from the >total situation< which book is meant. > When I use {lo}, I am > almost certainly immediately going to start telling you > enough about it so that it becomes specific. Again, perhaps not. I may simply not care about the specifics: "lo remna cu xekri" means "some humans are black", without any intent to specify which. > ("the so-called rat" - no that would be {la ratcu}), > I don't think {le}'s the answer. No, "la ratcu" is "something named 'Rat'". Not quite the same. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban.