On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 7:27 AM, Alex Rozenshteyn
<rpglover64@gmail.com> wrote:
But as I understand it, a cooperative speaker (correct me if I'm misusing the term) wouldn't name a dog "The Great Depression" as anything but a joke.
I don't see how you say that. My dog's name is Bear in English, la cribe in lojban. He is certainly not lo cribe, nor even le cribe. My daughters' name in lojban would be la melbi, but she also happens to be lo melbi be mi and so therefore le melbi, but that is not the same as her name. Now for something like "The Roaring Twenties", yeah, "la" would definitely be in order. The Great Depression is a border case. The point is that it certainly was an economic depression and it certainly was great. So "le" can be used, so could "la".
Furthermore, The Great Depression is a name that is used to refer to the time period by many, not just me.
How many people call something a particular name has absolutely no bearing on whether something is a la or not. Even if I'm the only one to call you by a particular nickname, I still use "la". The point is whether it's strictly a label or whether in fact it's truly descriptive.
I might expect someone using {lo} to be referring to some other time period which can be reasonable described as a "great depression", and {le} would still make me wonder if they meant this particular one.
My heuristic tended to be, if it's capitalized in English, (usually) use {la}, since if it's capitalized in English, it refers to a particular thing (which may not be a good terbri), unlike {le}, which can refer to one thing in one sentence and another in another.
And that's a great heuristic. But again, just like "Michael" may refer to different people in different contexts, there's no guarantee that "Great Depression" refers to only one period in time, in one place (or not, as I said, a dog, a nickname for a pothole in the highway (I know, a joke in English, but not in the lojban), etc.) So in that respect, it's not much different than "le".
Even now, when I refer to the Great Depression, I am referring to the period between 1929-1939 in the United States. But someone else might mean 1873-1896, which was also referred to as that. Someone else might be referring to the album by Trigger the Bloodshed, etc. etc. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Depression_%28disambiguation%29 for other ideas) So yeah, you can use "la" but in this particular case it also happens to be descriptive, and "le" would work as well.
--gejyspa
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, the point to remember is that "la banli nu pindi" refers to a particular something/someone that may not be a great depression. It's just a name. I could name my dog "la banli nu pindi", and then I could say "la banli nu pindi cu muvgau lo rebla be vo'a" But it would less likely to be true to say "le banli nu pindi cu muvgau lo rebla be vo'a" since here I am actually speaking about something that I am describing AS being a great depression (whether it is or not, that's how I'm choosing to describe it. It might be a dog, but that's highly unlikely). So if you are speaking about the period that in the United states lasted from 1929-1939, use "le" (or even "lo")
--gejyspa
When should one use a descriptive name as opposed to a non-name? e.g. (using {pindi} because I don't know enough economics to accurately translate "depression")
{le banli nu pindi} vs {la banli nu pindi}
--
mu'o mi'e .arpis.
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