Re: [lojban-beginners] {le} and {lo}

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

Current practice is away from using inaccurate descriptions in any
circumstance.  It turns out there's not much reason to really.  Once
upon a time we were thinking maybe if you wanted to refer to a little
plastic bear, you might want to call it {cribe}, bear.  But why?  You
can just as easily refer to it as a {slasi}, plastic, and avoid all
controversy and confusion.

If you do want to show in today's Lojban that you are not describing
something precisely, lo/le is not the tool you want.  You should use
{pe'a} if you're using a description metaphorically, or {sa'e nai} if
your description is imprecise in some other way.

If you want to mark whether something is new to the conversation, you
can use {bi'u} / {bi'u nai}, which closely parallels English's use of
"a" / "an" on a first mention and then "the" thereafter.  That happens
to be rarely used.  It's an obligatory thing to mark in English, but
there are plenty of other languages that do things differently.  In
Lojban these days descriptions are rarely repeated very often at all;
at first when something is introduced it's described, and then it's
connected somehow to a short name, usually to a letter name by
implication.  There's various other ways you could make things clear,
feel free to experiment, but try not to overload it onto lo/le.

So it's not precision or metaphor that's marked with lo/le, and it's
not whether things are newly introduced to the conversation, so what
is it?

The one and only thing that should be marked with lo/le, in my
opinion, is the distinction between discussing general categories of
activity and discussing particular referents.  To an example!

{mi citka lo badna} vs {mi citka le badna}

{mi citka lo badna} is definitely true.  I have indeed eaten bananas.
I like them a lot!  On the other hand, when it comes to {mi citka le
badna}, before I know whether it's true or not, I'll have to ask you
*which banana* we're talking about.  Get it?

OK so it gets a little confusing and very unenglishy: Any time you can
use {le}, you could also use {lo}.  Think about it: If for some
particular banana I can say about it {mi citka le badna}, then it's
also true as a general proposition that {mi citka lo badna}.  No one
eats a particular banana without becoming, in general, a banana-eater.

The confusion is deepened by the fact that we consider {mi citka lo
badna} a reasonable way to talk about a particular event of eating a
banana.  There's no reason you have to be specific about the banana in
question to say "I'm a banana eater" and mean that you've just eaten
one.

The use of lo/le with a {nu} abstraction is not different in any way.
Whether you want to refer to a particular event when talking about the
future may vary depending on your view on predestination.

mi'e la stela selckiku mu'o

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