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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 15:37:06 +0000

>>> John Cowan <[email-masked]> 01/14/02 03:19pm >>>
#And Rosta wrote:
[...]
#> #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.

I know that that is the official line, but I think it fails. "me X" is licit
and meaningful even when X has no referent. For example, "mi me
lo broda" = "Ex x is broda & I have the property of being x". In
contrast, "I am a referent of _lo broda_" would be nonsensical.

#> 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>".

Okay, though that's more "English-coloured Lojban" than malglico --
there's nothing really mabla about it unless you think that glico is
inherently mabla, which it seems is something that lots of Lojbanists
do think.
 
#> 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

I've never got straight in my mind how "la" works when 'plural'.
If "mi po'u la bab" means "each of us that is each thing called 'bab'",
then that fails. But if it means "each of us that is the group of things
each of which is called 'bab'" then it still fails. To be sure that what
you say is correct, I think we need the logical structure made
explicit, with, if necessary, an indication of which part of the
structure is provided by each word in the phrase.

--And.