From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Fri Oct 26 19:45:49 2001
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Subject: RE: [lojban] a construal of lo'e & le'e
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 03:44:48 +0100
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From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com>
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rob:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 01:44:36AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > I do want to wage war against excessive use of {le}. Doubtless it'll be
> > futile, but still it might be worthwhile. The problem is that people are
> > influenced by phonology when choosing 'default' forms, and hence 'le' and
> > 'lo' feel more default than lei/loi/le'e/lo'e. Yet for singleton categories,
> > 'le' and 'lo' are actually the least appropriate, involving redundant
> > quantification, and even lei/loi wrongly imply the relevance of a
> > distributive/collective distinction. So for singleton categories, le'e/lo'e
> > should be the default. At any rate, I myself will now be ditching
> {tu'odu'u} and
> > start using {lo'e du'u} instead.
>
> Thank you for ditching {tu'odu'u} - using tu'o as an article seems to be
> just a way to deliberately communicate nothing.

Exactly! It was a way of avoiding communicating unnecessary information and
having to decide which unnecessary information to communicate. But I now realize
that lo'e will do this job.

> I agree that {le} is overused, and I'm guilty of it myself - I tend to
> say {lenu} when I have no specific event(s) in mind, and actually mean
> {ronu}. I'm being more watchful for that now, and encourage others to do
> the same.

{ro} too requires great caution -- you have to check scopes are correct, & are
you sure you really mean "every"... Certainly if you have no specifics in mind
then a LE-series one is wrong. But ro v. lo v. loi v. lo'e still has to be
decided. To me, lo'e is by far the safest option.

--And.