[lojban-beginners] Re: lo and le

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Tom Gysel <to_mu1975@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 'Le' = 'one or more specific things which i describe as'
> 'lo' = 'one or more of all the things which really are'
>
> So 'lo' and 'le' both have two properties: 1.they are either specific or
> non-specific,

'lo' does not really have to be non-specific.

> and 2. they are naming something which either is actually what
> you name it , or you're not sure that it really is what you name it.

The non-veridical use of 'le' is rarely, if ever, due to not being
sure whether the description fits. You may choose a description which
you may not be sure fits, but that's an unlikely reason for choosing
the description. You choose the description because you think it will
be a useful one for your audience to identify what you are referring
to. In some extreme cases a description may be useful even though it's
not veridical. But that's not the usual case.


> 2. We're talking about a specific thing, AND not sure if it really is a what
> we name it. Corresponds to the Lojban gadri ' le '.

'le' is more like this: we're talking about a specific thing, and
we're pretty sure the description we use will be useful for the
audience to identify which specific thing we mean. We are not overly
concerned with whether the description actually and truly fits or not,
as long as it is useful.

> 3. We're talking about a non-specific thing, AND are sure it is what we name
> it. Corresponds to the gadri ' lo '.

It doesn't have to be a non-specific thing with 'lo'. It only has to
be something that fits the description.

> 4. The most sure and clear. We're talking about a specific thing AND are
> really sure it's what we name it.
>
> So 'le' adds more clarity to the vagueness, as does 'lo'.
>
> The fourth option does even more so, but why is there no gadri for that in
> lojban? (I guess in english this would be the article 'the')

I'm not sure English 'the' has a veridicality requirement. For
example, this is from a movie review:

"Then, the dog reveals that it is not really a dog, but some sort of
alien organism with the power to mimic other life-forms"

So "the dog" is used to describe something that is not really a dog,
and the speaker is not even uncertain about it. But it's still a
useful way of describing what they're talking about.

> How would you translate something like that into lojban?

If you want to describe some particular dog that you have in mind, and
you want to go out of your way to insist that it is an actual dog, you
may say {le ca'a gerku}, "that which I describe as being really a
dog", or better yet: {le gerku noi ca'a gerku}, "the dog, which really
is a dog". But that's an infrequent situation. The normal situation is
that when you choose a description to identify something, you will
choose it because it fits, so you don't really need to insist that it
does.

mu'o mi'e xorxes