[lojban] Re: le du

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

la mark cusku di'e

[...]
> > > {le du} is equivalent to {le su'o da}.
> >
> >As I think about it, I'm not really sure that's true.  That is, it is
> >true from a formal standpoint, but not necessarily pragmatically.  "le
> >du" is "something which is the same."  

No, that's {le mintu}. "du" does not mean "...is the same as...",
it does not say that two things are the same, it relates a thing
only with itself.

> >If I heard that in
> >conversation, the obvious naive question is "le du be ma?" "ma du ma?"

Everything is a du because everything dus itself. You don't need to 
ask what something is duing, as everything necessarily dus itself and 
only itself.

> >  It is certainly true that anything is the same as something (namely
> >itself), but doesn't this violate Gricean relevance?  The fact that
> >whatever it is is identical to something/itself may be true, but is
> >generally not relevant to whatever we're talking about. 

Is there any brivla with even less content that will do instead? We are 
using {du} to get the specificity content of {le} without any additional 
semantic content from the brivla.
 
> It's almost
> >like we're discussing my family, and I suddenly refer to "le ctuca"
> >without ever mentioning that my brother is a professor.

Not exactly. If you know what du means, you know that everything is
a du. If you know what ctuca means, you need not know that your brother 
is a ctuca.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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