On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, jjllambias2000 <jjllambias@hotmail.com> wrote:
Suppose that the folllowing are all true:
la meris pendo la djan noi mikce la meris na pendo la fred noi mikce la meris na pendo la alis noi mikce
Can we assert, based on that info, that:
la meris pendo lo mikce
? Yes, Mary is friend to at least one doctor, namely John. That of course does not mean that Mary is friend to any doctor.
"Is Mary the friend of any doctor at all? Does she have any friends who are doctors?"
"Why, yes, she is the friend of a doctor."
If someone asks:
xu la meris pendo lo mikce
We have to answer {go'i}, she is the friend of at least one doctor.
How one can be a friend to a nonspecific doctor is hard to imagine.
"Mary is friendly to doctors" may best be expressed by a quantifier, e.g. {la meris. pendo so'e lo mikce} (allowing that there are probably a few doctors who really piss her off). But that raises the question of whether it is necessary to add the qualification {poi ke'a penmi ra} or whether pragmatics dictate that since Mary cannot be a friend of doctors she doesn't know, so it's unnecessary.
That again does not at all mean that Mary needs any doctor, all we are saying is that there is at least one that she needs.
The way Xod and Craig want to use {lo} is not how it has been defined, but there certainly is a need for that other meaning. I use {lo'e} for that other meaning, but I would favour changing {lo} for that function, because it is very frequent and basic. That would change the meaning of {la meris pendo lo mikce} to "Mary is friendly to doctors", a generic statement, rather than the concrete meaning "Mary is friend to at least one doctor" that it has now.
lo'e is a little heavy-handed. It achieves its nonspecificity by stripping all distinction away from the doctors. "friendly to doctors" doesn't necessarily apply to nontypical doctors, whereas lo mikce does include them
-- "The raisins may be the best part of a cake, but that doesn't mean that a bag of raisins is better than a cake." - Wittgenstein
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey