Opi Lauma wrote:
For example to say that the dog is man's best friendyouwould use {lo gerku}: {lo gerku cu xagrai pendo lo remna}OK, in this example {lo gerku} means neither "all dogs" nor "some dogs", it rather means "most of dogs" isn't? Really, we can say that "the dog is man's best friend" only if MOST OF DOGS are man's best friends. Or the same {lo gerku} can be replaced here by "a typical dog" without changes in meaning, I think. So, are "most of ..." and "a typical ..." correct substitution for {lo}? If "Yes", can this interpretation be used always? By the way in English sentence "The" has been used and in lojban {lo}. Why?
{lo gerku cu pendo lo remna} means that there is at least one dog, such that it is a friend to at least one human, which is not what we want here. The article you want is probably {lo'e}
lo'e gerku cu pendo lo'e remna The typical dog is a friend to the typical human.I'm leaving out the "best" part for simplicity's sake, since then you'd have to rephrase it along the lines of "Of the friends of the typical human, the best one is a dog" or "the best creature by the standard of being a friend to the typical human is the typical dog."
What happens with "the <-> le", "an/a <-> lo" correspondence?
That is never more than a very rough guide, and not a very helpful one IMHO. There are three senses of "the" which may make the use of "le" appropriate: the non-veridical sense (e.g. "The Queen Mary" is a ship, not a queen), the specific sense ("the man in the corner") and the old-information sense ("Yesterday I saw a dog. The dog bit me.") Actually the latter sense is more specifically covered by "bi'unai", but "le" will do as a kludge, since it means "the thing I have in mind", and if you've just referred to it, you have it in mind. One use of "the" which isn't covered by "le" is typicality, as we see above. Here's another example from TCLL:
lo'e cinfo cu xabju le f'iortu'a The lion dwells in Africa. robin.tr --"I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another where the best fruit is." -- Terry Pratchett
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin