Subject: Re: [lojban] po'u considered harmful

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 10:19:18 -0500

And Rosta wrote:

> If so, they would be wrong. "du" means logical identity, which, when
> its sumti are referring expressions, as in this case, means that the sumti
> refer to the same individual.

Just so.

> #as one could easily say either
> #'mi'e kreig.' or 'mi me la kreig.' 
> 
> The latter is equivalent pragmatically but not semantically. It means
> "I have the property of Craighood".

Not really: that would be "mi ckaji loka me la kreig." It means,
rather, "I am one of the Craigs", given that we don't really know
if "la kreig." has a singular or a plural referent.

> Your criticisms of du have no basis. Likewise, the prevalent idea that 
> _du_ tends to be malglico has no basis.

What's malglico is to say "mi du lo <selbri>" instead of just
"mi <selbri>".

> When I saw the Subject Line "po'u considered harmful", I incorrectly
> guessed that you were going to make the valid point that when
> people say "mi po'u la bab" they usually mean "mi no'u la bab".

> "Mi po'u la bab" selects from the group of speakers and refers to the
> one that is la bab.

"mi po'u la bab" can also mean "We who are Bobs". It is probably
relevant here that customer service workers at Demon Internet
(demon.co.uk) are called Bobs: see
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/bob.html

-- 
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