[lojban] Re: "they"
Pierre Abbat
> In a message dated 2003-07-24 5:21:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>
> eca...@digitalkingdom.org writes:
> > > Who went? "They" is anaphora, it's only meaningful in English when
> > > we've already been talking about some group.
>
> "they" is ambiguous in english. it's often anaphoric, referring to
> people/things already spoken of, but it can also be deictic, referring to
> people/things who are neither speaker nor addressee, but not referred to
> before. ex: (pointing at some group of people) "who are they?"
"They" can also refer to more than one thing (as opposed to one group)
previously mentioned, e.g. "The cheetah chased the gazelle. They are tired.".
For this I invented {xai}.
> btw, "ledu" seems weird to me.
Me too. It sounds like using "same" for "it".
phma
--
.i toljundi do .ibabo mi'afra tu'a do
.ibabo damba do .ibabo do jinga
.icu'u la ma'atman.
Morphem...@wmconnect.com
> Who went? "They" is anaphora, it's only meaningful in English when we've
> already been talking about some group.
stevo
And Rosta
> > btw, "ledu" seems weird to me.
>
> Me too. It sounds like using "same" for "it".
As xorxes has said, the meaning of "ledu" is simply the automatic
product of the meaning of "le" and the meaning of "du". When
used with a meaning analogous to that of "them", "du" is used
as the semantically emptiest possible brivla (not because it
is semantically empty, but because it is so uninformative,
given that ro da du su'o de. If Lojban had such a thing as a
dummy brivla with no meaning, then we would use that instead.
--And.