Re: [lojban-beginners] Special reference, underspecified

[Jonathan Jones]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:01 AM, neizyn. <sja...@gmail.com> wrote:

coi

.i mi'e neizyn.

 

Sorry, I'm just a beginnger! but I was wondering about a special situation.

Suppose there's a group of girls with one guy; I'm talking to one of the girls, and I make a statement referring to the guy without unambiguously referring to him by name or other reference. This is because he's the only person in the group like that. Say he's blonde. Is there a way I can say that "someone is blond" oooooor 'blonde exists/obtains such that x is blonde' ? Better yet, could I use that with some kind of reference? 

{pa pelxre} == {pa da poi pelkre} => "one X which-is golden-haired"
{pa lo prenu poi pelxre} => "A singular person which-is blonde"
{lo pelxre prenu} => "One or more blonde type-of person"
{ko'a goi (any of the above)} => "It-1, which-is what we will call {any of the above)"

I'm sure there's other ways to do it as well, but those are the most obvious, to me at any rate.

--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

[mudri]

Isn't this a situation for {le}, as in {le se pelkre}? As I understand it, {le} makes the listener assume that the speaker is talking about something(s) known, rather than just anything that fits the description. .iepei doi jbocre?

[Ian Johnson]

The first version is wrong; that says "there exists exactly one yellow haired thing which ..." (Rather, there is a very slightly less controversial version that I tend to subscribe to: "there is exactly one yellow-haired thing that is at all possible to come up in discussion which ..." The point is that the default universe of discourse should be the universe of discourse, there shouldn't be anything that be reasonably anticipated to come up in conversation that isn't actually in it.)

If you use su'o instead it's not terrible, but really {da} constructs when you don't want nice sharp precision tend to be undesirable, in my experience.

At any rate, here I'd probably say {lo se ke pelxu kerfa}. {le} might also be appropriate in this context, but I doubt I'd use it. That said, I think more likely the structure of the discussion would be different among fluent in-real-life Lojban speakers. (Few of these exist; I, for example, am pretty quick on IRC, but am almost completely helpless when it comes to spatial things.) I'd expect a lot of up-front establishment of pronouns, for example.

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

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[Jonathan Jones]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 7:58 AM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:

Isn't this a situation for {le}, as in {le se pelkre}? As I understand it, {le} makes the listener assume that the speaker is talking about something(s) known, rather than just anything that fits the description. .iepei doi jbocre?

The use of {le} signifies that the user is talking about a specific thing or things, which may or not be what the speaker is using to describe them.

For example, {le mustlei} "The weasel(s)", could be used to refer to the employees of a law firm, since, at least in English, lawyers are often called weasels.

So this is a situation in which you could use {le}, but you don't have to, as lo pelxre is assumed to refer to the most obvious thing it can be in the given context
 

On Monday, 31 December 2012 17:01:01 UTC, neizyn. wrote:

coi

.i mi'e neizyn.

 

Sorry, I'm just a beginnger! but I was wondering about a special situation.

Suppose there's a group of girls with one guy; I'm talking to one of the girls, and I make a statement referring to the guy without unambiguously referring to him by name or other reference. This is because he's the only person in the group like that. Say he's blonde. Is there a way I can say that "someone is blond" oooooor 'blonde exists/obtains such that x is blonde' ? Better yet, could I use that with some kind of reference? 

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[Jonathan Jones]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:21 AM, Ian Johnson <blindb...@gmail.com> wrote:

The first version is wrong; that says "there exists exactly one yellow haired thing which ..." (Rather, there is a very slightly less controversial version that I tend to subscribe to: "there is exactly one yellow-haired thing that is at all possible to come up in discussion which ..." The point is that the default universe of discourse should be the universe of discourse, there shouldn't be anything that be reasonably anticipated to come up in conversation that isn't actually in it.)

I subscribe to the idea that the "universe of discourse" is bound by the context that discourse is in, mainly because forcing PA GISMU to mean that there is exactly PA things that GISMU makes the construct pretty much useless, seeing as statements like that are pretty much always incorrect. But this isn't the list to talk about thee issues, being the beginner's thread and all.
 

[Jonathan Jones]

Sorry, I meant "... PA things that GISMU in the entire universe, real and imagined, for all of the span of time...."

[Ian Johnson]

This is a good suggestion. I just want to remind that {le} is not {lo bi'unai}; {le} makes no promises whatsoever about whether the object has been mentioned already.

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

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[Ian Johnson]

This drastically hinders the precision (in fact it basically makes it exactly the same as PA lo GISMU), but yes, PA GISMU under this model is an extremely compact form for a rather uncommon usage.

But fair enough; at the very least the {pa se pelkre} version is sketchy, and we'll leave it at that.

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

[Jacob Errington]

Assuming no one else is blonde, of course, {lo pelxu} is fine :P

[Jonathan Jones]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:46 PM, Jacob Errington <nict...@gmail.com> wrote:

Assuming no one else is blonde, of course, {lo pelxu} is fine :P

And there are no ducklings, taxi-cabs, or daffodils in view, and it's nighttime (except in Japan where they say the sun is red, it can be day there). :P
 

[Jacob Errington]

Tsk tsk, now you're just being yellow with silliness.

[Jonathan Jones]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 11:06 PM, Jacob Errington <nict...@gmail.com> wrote:

Tsk tsk, now you're just being yellow with silliness.

.i mi ba'e jgicro zo'ocai