Subject: RE: [lojban] a construal of lo'e & le'e

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 00:29:14 -0400 (EDT)

On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, And Rosta wrote:

> I do want to wage war against excessive use of {le}.

This is what I expected, and I look forward to another go-round of the
veridicality debate which will necessarily arise, not so I can argue a
position but so I can re-learn the theory. The idea of "mi claxu ro
fipybirka" is intriguing, and illustrates a place where using a logical
language actually has an impact on usage! Usually I wonder why anyone
bothers with the appelation of "logical", since most sentences translate
conceptually without alteration into English. Yet here is a case where the
simple translation "I lack every fish fin" is interesting English.

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.

I think a singleton category is noted with le pa broda. For the trivial
case of a set containing only one member, doesn't le'e reduce to le [pa]?
What's the archetype of a singleton; what is the mean of a single event?

-- 
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