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

[Ben Foppa <eatingstaples@gmail.com>]

Thanks for the very lengthy response; it certainly clears things up
(and then some). My confusion now is to when I'm creating ideas, like
telling a story. In English, I'd say "A dog went to drink from its
bowl. The dog was blue." It sounds like in Lojban, I would use {lo}
instead of "A", and then {lo bi'u} to replace "the"?

Also, I'm a little confused as to your last bit about the banana - how
would one distinguish between "I eat bananas" and "I just ate a
banana"? Would "I just ate a banana" become "I eat bananas.. just
now"?

On Jun 28, 2:26 am, Stela Selckiku <selck...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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