And Rosta,
From your examples, I grant that some personal names start with "The".
I agree with you that Capitalization in these phrases in the book serves a semantic narrowing function like "the Bank", although this is not at all tantamount to onomastic.
Your last paragraph I cannot make head nor tail of.
A claim that "le" is unsuitable for rendering "the" in the main is clearly at odds with the grammars I have seen, esp. CLL 6.2
``and in fact “le” is quite close in meaning to English “the”. ''
The phrase "a certain" can be appropriate for the first reference to something definite with "le", but not to later references to the same thing, where we would still use "le" and "the".
The xorlo definitional difference between "le" and "la" depends pretty much on the difference between "cmene" and "skicu do".
A cmene depends critically on an act of naming, with or without any reference to the meaning of the selbri used as name.
The ve skicu depends only on the meaning of the selbri and on the context.
In the book phrases there is abundant evidence that the ve skicu is essential, and no evidence of any act of naming other than the evidence of capitalization, which we seem to agree means something else here.
I am trying to stand squarely in the CLL+BPFK mainstream here, and I'm not sure that that is your goal here.
If you have some additional evidence against "le" to bring up, I'm all ears.
Vincent Broman, la bremenli
On Saturday, December 2, 2017 at 7:33:56 AM UTC-8, And Rosta wrote:
On 2 Dec 2017 02:14, <
vpbr...@gmail.com> wrote:
And,
Vocatives are used in the text by the characters, but only with cmevla, not with the descriptive "names".
I grant that some descriptive phrases in English are names, e.g. a pub named "The Prancing Horse" has a three-word name, starting with "The".
But in English a personal name never starts with "the".
It's "Fast Eddy", "Slim Pickings", "Minnesota Fats", "Deep Throat", etc, not "The Fast Eddy".
Inherently onomastic nouns like _Eddy_ don't normally occur with _the_ when not premodified, but nicknames and character names perfectly well can, e.g. names of professional wrestlers (the Ringmaster, the Iceman, the Great Kabuki), _the Black Prince_ (i.e. Edward of Woodstock), and so forth.
The fact that the phrases in question are capitalized by the English-speaking author does not indicate they are names, as we can see by examining his usage.
Below I quote illustrative examples from the book.
"I am a Woodman, and made of tin." is clearly an indefinite reference, and it gets capitalized.
Similarly, "a great Lion bounded into the road.", "and another a Lion.", " "A Lion!" cried the little Queen", "Others of the Monkeys" are indefinite.
The author doesn't use capitals to indicate use of a name, but rather a reference to a main character, it seems.
It looks like capitalization is here being used both with its semantic narrowing function, as when in documents internal to a particular bank, it is referred to as "the Bank", which is tantamount to onomastic function, or "a Cruel and Unusual Punishment", whose defining criteria are those not of ordinary English but rather of the US constitution, and as marking the names of races (as in "a Scot", "a Briton", "a Dwarf"). Not all names are arbitrary.
When rendering these sorts of unarbitrary name into Lojban, a vacillation between "lo" and "la" would be understandable, tho I myself would be inclined pretty much to treat English capitalization as the criterion for using "la" in place of "lo". I suppose it stands to reason that if "lo" may be used with unarbitrary names then so may "le". In my earlier messages I had said that "le" seems unsuitable for rendering "the" in the main, but that presupposes a certain understanding of "le", the logical form of which makes it pretty much equivalent to "a certain", whereas I suppose that CLL could be interpreted in a way that makes it more consistent with "the", tho in that case I would struggle to see how it differs from xorlo "lo" (which probably explains why xorlovian apologists favour jettisoning all gadri but "lo" and "la").
--And.