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[lojban] Re: lo questions



On 2/5/08, Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 3, 2008 1:39 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >   ro lo nixli cu ponse re lo gerku .i ro lo gerku cu xekri
> >   Each girl owns two dogs. All the dogs are black.
>
>  Okay, maybe now I'm confused.  Why is the last sentence not "ro _le_
> gerku cu xekri"?  What is thte difference in implication?

Very little, as far as I can see. It would be slightly odd to use
{le} in the second sentence and {lo} in the first one though, if
{lo gerku} has the same referents both times. If the speaker
has certain girls and certain dogs in mind, then {le} might
be appropriate, but maybe that's not the case. We could
perhaps make it more likely that the speaker does not have
certain girls and dogs in mind with something like:

  .ei ro lo nixli cu ponse re lo gerku .i .ei ro lo gerku cu xekri
  Each girl ought to own two dogs. All the dogs ought to be black.

> Can "le"
> perhaps mean that only the two dogs that are owned by ONE (or other
> subset) of the girls are black,

Very unlikely, absent further context. If that's what the speaker
has in mind, it is hard to see how the listener could figure it out
just from those words. But I suppose it could be the case given
some more context. For example, if pointing to one girl you say
{ro le gerku cu xekri}, it might be taken to mean {ro le gerku
poi ta ponse}.

>while "lo" forces all of the dogs
> owned by all of the girls to be black?

I don't think {lo gerku} in one bridi can actually force anything
about {lo gerku} in another bridi, but it would be surprising that
they have different referents if nothing in the context has changed.

If we want to be absolutely sure that the two are understood
to have the same referents, it would be safer to use {goi ko'a}
the first time and then use {ko'a} the second time.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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