On 12.08.2006, 5:52, Hal Fulton wrote:
> Michael Graff wrote:
>> What puzzles me are these correspondences:
>> definite <-> described as
>> indefinite <-> really is
> That says in a nutshell something that has bothered
> me subconsciously for a long time.
> I don't think the people who answered you addressed
> this specifically either (unless I overlooked it).
> On top of that, I have never seen the need for the
> distinction between "described as" and "really is."
> Sometimes I may use metaphors or something; but in
> general, when I "describe something as" a foobar,
> I basically mean it "really is" a foobar.
{lo} is used by the speaker when he believes or wants to show that he believes that there is a true correspondence between the words he uses and their normative meaning, so that just any speaker of Lojban, who's just entered the context, will understand them as the person he's addressing his words to.
{le} is used by the speaker when he knows that the words he uses to describe something may be understood not in the way he intended them to be understood, by a Lojban speaker who's out of context (I mean who doesn't know the context of the conversation). {le} says: "Look! The following selbri isn't what you may think of if I were {lo}! You may need a bit of context to resolve what the following denotes or referres to".
In English, there are "a" and "the", which very often mean pretty much the same (but not always! for example, "water" which "really is water" is used without "a", and "the Sun", which "really is a Sun", is used with "the").
In Russian, there are no analogues of {lo}/{le} and "a"/"the", i. e. Russians are very close to Hal Fulton's way of thinking of things. That leads me to a conclusion that if Russians were the creators of Lojban, there wouldn't have been two different gadri like {lo} and {le}.
mi'e .ianis.