RE: [lojban] RE:su'u

["James F. Carter" <jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU>]

On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, And Rosta wrote:
> Lojbab:
> > I is a mere label assigned by the speaker, hopefully allowing 
> > communication, like "le" descriptions.  
> 
> "le" descriptions aren't a mere label. They describe the referent,
> even though the description is not claimed to be true.

I don't think that's quite the right distinction.  In JCB's famous
example: "Hey, the woman is a *man*!", the whole point is that the sumti
after "le" is not veridical and everyone (now) knows it.  I read this to
imply:

You choose the sumti so the listener gets some help identifying which
referent you're talking about.  It would be cheating to say "the cat is a
man", unless he were dressed up in a feminine cat costume.  

But the sumti is not a description.  A description is a very heavy
commitment by the speaker and is veridical.  A "le" sumti has a different
purpose and a different, lesser weight than a description.  Think of the
key versus the value or field content in a database lookup: the values are
what is supposed to be true, or what you're supposed to be able to rely on
from the database, whereas the key is a throwaway instrument for obtaining
the value.

Even so, it's a fact that "le" sumti potentially could be asserted
truly, because it's very efficient to identify referents by characteristics
which (you think) are obviously true to the listener.  By analogy, database
keys are often values from fields of another table, e.g. in a join.

So the "le" sumti is potentially chosen arbitrarily by the speaker, but an
effective speaker will go beyond the strict rules of the language and make
an optimal choice from the arbitrary possibilities, which (usually) truly
applies to the referent.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
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