[lojban] Re: Usage of lo and le

["Maxim Katcharov" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 5/12/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/11/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > We're sitting in a room filled with bears, which is in a zoo filled
> > with bears, in a forest filled with bears - whatever. We've been
> > talking about the bears in the zoo for the past hour - their past,
> > their future, bears that we may own, whatever. Suddenly, I want to
> > talk about "all bears that have ever existed":
> >
> > {e'u mi'o casnu lo ro cribe poi pu ja ca zasti}
> >
> > This suggests that, of the "bears that can be relevantly said to be
> > bears" (the ones in the zoo only, for some reason), I want to talk
> > about the ones that do exist or have existed. How do I express my "all
> > bears", that is, "all bears that have, will, currently exist, in the
> > imagination, hypothetically, or otherwise", that is "X such that are
> > bears".
>
> For example:
>
> lo ro cribe poi zasti ja xanri gi'e nenri ja bartu le dalpanka

Ok, for the last 5 days we've been talking about the bears in the
forest. How do I know that you aren't inviting me to speak of the
relevant bears there? They are, of course, much more relevant than all
the bears in the universe, ever.

In your strategy, you basically have to say something that doesn't
make sense in the current context (and therefore you're talking about
a new one). If by my strategy you wanted to "move between contexts,
disregarding all context that currently exists":
{__ ro cribe}
{__ ro cribe poi nenri [this zoo]}
{__ ro cribe poi nenri [this forest]}
{__ ro cribe poi mi'o ponse}
{__ ro cribe poi ...}


I'll repeat and clarify from another response I made:

You state that {__ ro cribe poi [in that cage]} refers to the bears
that are in context/"are relevantly seen as bears". What if the
relevant bears that we've been talking about for the last hour are
some specific 20 bears, 2 of which are in the cage? (You strongly
suspect that there are more than these 2 bears in the cage.) This
would say "all of the (those 20 relevant) bears that are in the cage
(there are 2)" - but it doesn't say what I want to say - all of the
bears in the cage, whatever number there is in there, context aside.

> Or translate even more of your English paragraph. You can do it
> in Lojban in the same or a similar way that you are doing it in English.
> It's not something that comes up very often, so in my opinion it is not
> a good idea to waste a short expresion for it.

But it is used a lot. You just use a hack (saying something that would
be unintelligible within the current context) in order to express it.

> > What's the difference between those "in context", and those
> > "relevantly said to be"?
>
> >From dictionary.com:
>
> con·text
> 1. The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word
> or passage and determines its meaning.
> 2. The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting.
>
> " 'All bears' in context " uses sense 1 of "context".
> "All bears in context" uses sense 2 of "context".

I disagree. Both of those use sense 1. Words like "nau", "mi", "ti",
[...] are used to express the second sense. The first is used to
disambiguate, the second is used to place things relative to it in
time and space. If you disagree, then perhaps an example that
demonstrates the difference that you see between " 'all bears' in
context" and "all bears in context"?


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