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Re: [lojban-beginners] {da} and {zasti}
In my understanding:
{da cevni} says "There is a divinity in the universe of discourse". It says nothing about whether a god actually exists.
{lo cevni ku zasti} is something like "something unspecified which is a god exists [to someone unspecified in some unspecified metaphysics]". This probably means {lo cevni ku zasti fi zu'i}, which means "something unspecified which is a god exists in the usual metaphysics" which was used in that discussion to mean "...actually exists in reality".
{da poi cevni cu zasti} is "there exists x in the universe of discourse and which is a god, such that x exists". The same qualification about fi zu'i etc. applies here.
The point is that if you're using {da}, outside somewhat trivial situations (where you universally quantify over an empty domain, or where you use a {no} quantifier) you assert {da zasti fi de} but in general not {da zasti fi zu'i}, since we talk about things that don't exist in reality quite frequently (cf. for example djica2). With {lo} you have all the subtlety of xorlo, which is worthy of its own discussion, probably.
Note that even this issue is a fair bit controversial; as you'll see in various discussions, most recently "context and precision", the best choice of a scope for {da} variables isn't entirely clear. The full linguistic universe of discourse is rather impractically large; almost anything else has unsatisfactory gaps. The optimal solution may be to say {da poi zasti} when this is intended and otherwise use the full universe of discourse, but this is frustrating too.
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