2011/2/23 Jorge Llambías
<jjllambias@gmail.com>
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Michael Turniansky
<
mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> But certainly, why can't "le
> prenu" mean, "lo prenu poi ba zvati le tersla .u lo prenu poi mi djuno lo
> du'u ke'a zvati le tersla" [(those persons that will be at the party)
> whether-or-not (those persons I know will be at the party)]?
Yeah, actually, originally, I had it, when I thought your sentence was different (I was describing it as the stuff that the listener had in mind, not as people at a party). When I realized I hadn't properly addressed your scenario, I erased and rewrote that part, but I cut too much. u'u
I'm not saying "le" can't be used that way. I only say I don't know
how "le" is meant to be used.
> That's the way
> I'm defining le to refer to in this instance. I may not people to enumerate
> who they are, but I can still (mentally) refer to them as "whoever will be
> at the party". That's the whole point of "le". It basically screams
> "context dependant".
The usual explanation for "le broda" is that it is used to refer to
certain things that the speaker has in mind (and that the speaker
chooses to describe as broda), not to whatever things fit a certain
description that the speaker has in mind (but that the speaker chooses
to describe as broda instead). Do you agree there is a difference
bewteen those two?
I am asserting that "le" refers to the members of some set (possibly empty??) that the speaker has in mind, but it doesn't mean that the speaker has to be aware of what those members actually are, _in fact_.
In any case, all this stuff about "le" has nothing to do with my
point, which was the comparison of "ro da" and "ro prenu".
Except that that wasn't the point of yours that I was referring to most recently, which started with your message of
"If "ro prenu" can, in some contexts, refer to the 6 or 7 billion
people alive that make up the human population of the Earth today,
then it can just as well refer, in a different context, to the 6 or 7
people in the room now. There are, in both cases, an infinite number
of potential values being left out that may turn up in another
context."
> "ro prenu" is more qualified,
> and hence more restrictive than "ro da".
In any domain of discourse that includes things that are not prenu, of
course it is. If the domain of discourse includes only things that are
prenu, it isn't more restrictive.
You seem to be saying that for you there is no such thing as a domain
of discourse, or alternatively, that there is one and only one domain
of discourse that applies to any and all utterances. Am I
understanding you correctly?
I'm saying 1) that domains of discourse can't be implicitly figured out by context, they must be explicit, and additionally, that 2) "ro da/de/di", without further qualification, refers to capital E everything. And that 3) "ro le ___" is a simple solution that papers over everything (ro da poi se srana) because it says you are restriciting the context explicitly (although exactly to what is implilcit).
--gejyspa