From - Thu Sep 25 16:21:49 1997 Message-ID: <342AC7DD.61AB@locke.ccil.org> Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:21:49 -0400 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: LE and VOI Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 778 la .and. cusku di'e > So the following combos are useful: > > 1 nonspecific, veridical > 2 specific, veridical, "indefinite" (= referent not (necessarily) > identifiable by addressee) > 3 specific, nonveridical, "definite" (= referent not (necessarily) > identifiable by addressee) > > Function 1 is performed by {lo}. Functions 2 & 3 are both > performed by {le}. Both 2 & 3 are useful, & it wd be nice to > think of an easy way to distinguish them. The closest analogue is "lebi'u" for 2 and "lebi'unai" for 3. "bi'u" signals "new information", so "lebi'u nanmu" = "a man, a certain man", whereas "lebi'unai nanmu" = "the (previously mentioned) man". -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban