Re: [lojban-beginners] Special reference, underspecified

[Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>]

The first version is wrong; that says "there exists exactly one yellow haired thing which ..." (Rather, there is a very slightly less controversial version that I tend to subscribe to: "there is exactly one yellow-haired thing that is at all possible to come up in discussion which ..." The point is that the default universe of discourse should be the universe of discourse, there shouldn't be anything that be reasonably anticipated to come up in conversation that isn't actually in it.) 

If you use su'o instead it's not terrible, but really {da} constructs when you don't want nice sharp precision tend to be undesirable, in my experience. 

At any rate, here I'd probably say {lo se ke pelxu kerfa}. {le} might also be appropriate in this context, but I doubt I'd use it. That said, I think more likely the structure of the discussion would be different among fluent in-real-life Lojban speakers. (Few of these exist; I, for example, am pretty quick on IRC, but am almost completely helpless when it comes to spatial things.) I'd expect a lot of up-front establishment of pronouns, for example. 

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:01 AM, neizyn. <sjacket@gmail.com> wrote:

coi

.i mi'e neizyn.

 

Sorry, I'm just a beginnger! but I was wondering about a special situation.

Suppose there's a group of girls with one guy; I'm talking to one of the girls, and I make a statement referring to the guy without unambiguously referring to him by name or other reference. This is because he's the only person in the group like that. Say he's blonde. Is there a way I can say that "someone is blond" oooooor 'blonde exists/obtains such that x is blonde' ? Better yet, could I use that with some kind of reference? 

{pa pelxre} == {pa da poi pelkre} => "one X which-is golden-haired"
{pa lo prenu poi pelxre} => "A singular person which-is blonde"
{lo pelxre prenu} => "One or more blonde type-of person"
{ko'a goi (any of the above)} => "It-1, which-is what we will call {any of the above)"

I'm sure there's other ways to do it as well, but those are the most obvious, to me at any rate.

--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

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