Re: di'e preti zo nu

["Jorge J. Llambías" <jorge@intermedia.com.ar>]

la robin cusku di'e

>>         For every x which is one of the three children, and for
>>         every y which is one of the apples, x eats y.
>>
>Does it say this in the formal grammar?  After all, {le} is not necessarily
>singular.

Every x eats every one of the apples, it may well be more than one.

>I misunderstood you - I thought you were saying that if you were going to
drop
>any article, it would be {lei}.

No, If I were to drop articles {lei} is the only one I'd keep. {le'i} and
{lo'i}
would be the first ones I'd drop.

> Actually I only think articles are of much use
>in identifying something as a sumti rather than a selbri - if this weren't
vital
>in order to parse a lojban sentence, I wouldn't bother with articles at
all.  As
>my Turkish wife says, "artikeller gereksiz" (unnecessary).

I would agree if we were starting from scratch. I would use a single
article to identify a sumti, and nothing else. But that's not how Lojban
works. In Lojban, articles serve at least two other functions besides
identifying a sumti: to distinguish collective vs. distributive plurals,
lei vs. le, and the le vs. lo distinction, whatever we want to call it.
(There's also the function of {lo'e}, but I'm not yet confident that
I understand that one.) It is not possible to ignore these distinctions
and remain within the logical constraints of the language. These
logical aspects could have been taken care of by other means, but
the fact is that they were put into the articles.

co'o mi'e xorxes