Jorge Llambías wrote:By English semantics it is somewhat odd. It seems precisely to represent in Lojban the choice in the English to capitalize what are normally common nouns in English. Compare "suddenly a John Smith with brown hair ran past her" (would "la" be semantically odd in translating that?).
As I said, using "la" for:
...when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her...
is at the very least semantically odd. (Syntactically, it is fine.)
With the proviso that I don't know what "la" is currently defined as under the adopted xorlo %^) The capitalization suggests a named referent, and in English suggests the possibility of plural such named referents of which this is but one. Lojban "la" is (I suspect) ambivalent in number. It is possible that under xorlo, which IIRC has no default number interpretation, all instances of English "a" should correctly be translated as "pa lo" or "pa le" or "pa la".
...if you mean "one bear", consider actually saying "pa cribe"....
lojbab
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