[lojban] Re: use of ko'a

[Adam Raizen <araizen@newmail.net>]

de'i li 2003-07-21 ti'u li 09:16:00 la'o zoi. adam .zoi cusku di'e

>On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, And Rosta wrote:
>
>> Translate English "They went." I can see two ways:
>>
>> 1. ko'a klama
>> 2. le du cu klama
>>
>> Neither uses anaphora, and I cannot see any way of using anaphora.
>
>Who went?  "They" is anaphora, it's only meaningful in English when we've
>already been talking about some group.  And if that's the case, there's nothing
>wrong with ra.

That's not necessarily true at all. You can tell the referrent of English
pronouns by pointing them out implicitly or explicitly, or the referrent
may rely on knowledge shared by the speaker and the listener, or on general 
knowledge.

>  I'm also curious why you couldn't translate "They went." as
>3. klama
>
>which doesn't tell us a thing about who went, but neither does unbound ko'a.
>If you're going to have to glork who ko'a is, then why don't you just use zo'e
>the way it's intended?

"klama" and "ko'a klama" by themselves are similar, except that with "ko'a klama"
the speaker necessarily has something in mind, whereas he may or may not have
something in mind with "klama"; however, the ko'a version allows using ko'a later
on to unambiguously refer to the same thing, and ko'a can take relative phrases,
i.e., something like "ko'a poi nanmu cu klama".

mu'o mi'e .adam.