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[lojban] Re: Usage of lo and le
On 5/12/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/12/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.)
If you strongly suspect that there are more than these 2 bears in the
cage, then {ro} would definitely include them.
What use is this at all to the listener? I mean, if the listener
didn't matter, we wouldn't even have an inner quantifier, nor
restrictions (even cribe). We'd just say "did you see thing(s) at the
thing(s)?". The reason we're using {ro}, restrictions ({poi}) and
whatnot is so that the listener can know what our referant is. How is
the listener going to know that you're talking about all (ever) bears
now in the cage, and not all in-context/relevant bears now in the
cage?
> {__ ro cribe poi nenri le va selri'u} 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.
No, it wouldn't say that. It would refer to anything that could relevantly
be said to be a bear in the cage, and any other bear in the cage besides
the ones we've been talking about before can certainly be relevantly said
to be a bear in the cage from what you are saying.
We havn't been talking about those bears before. This is the whole point.
> The utility of my inner {ro} would be that the listener wouldn't need
> to consider context (like those 20 relevant bears), nor be confused by
> it where it works against what the speaker is saying (like when I want
> to talk about all and potentially not-currently-relevant bears that
> are in the cage).
If you want to talk about them, and they are bears, then they can relevantly
be said to be bears. Your wanting to talk about them automatically makes
them relevant to the discourse. If your audience, for whatever reason, is
not on your same page, you have to bring them there in order to be able
to communicate effectively. There is no universally fixed referent of "bears
in that cage" that can be relied on for every possible context ever.
Yes, there is: "all the bears in that cage now". How is this even
remotely ambiguous?
> Also, what is the difference between your {L_ cribe}, and your {L_ ro cribe}?
{ro} emphasizes that none can be left out. For instance, in the example
I gave before about the quotas: "All bears killed by people, including
emergency kills, illegal kills, subsistence, and sport hunting must
be accounted for under the quota", the "all" is important: each and every
bear must be accounted for. It is also fairly clear from just that single
sentence that it does not refer to all bears killed by people ever and
anywhere, but if you read the whole document where the sentence comes
from it is even more clear that it's about grizzly bears in the Gwich'in
Settlement Area, (and obviously not concerned about killings in that area
before the agreement came into effect, whenever that was). I would
certainly use {ro} in a Lojban translation of that.
So you're saing that {L_ cribe} defaults to {L_ su'o cribe}, "some
relevant bears"?
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