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la and cusku di'e
> (Hopefully we won't waste {lo'e} on this. It is not the
> kind of thing we say all the time such that it requires
> a special gadri.)
It's not a very gadri-ish meaning, so for that reason isn't
a prime candidate for {lo'e}, but I don't see why the form
{lo'e} is so precious that we mustn't waste it. Monosyllabic
cmavo are ultraprecious (& with hindsight, many of those
were squandered), but oodles of disyllabics are available.
{lo'e} has a couple of practical advantages over other
disyllabics: (1) it is recognized by parsers, so that you can
check your grammar if you use it (I almost never actually
use the parsers, but anyway) and (2) it appears on word lists,
so that people new to the language can at least know it is
a gadri.
I don't want to insist on differences if the differences are
trivial. There certainly are differences:
* loi'e makes claims only about worlds where there is only
one broda.
* lo'ei creates an underspecified proposition {co'e tu'o
du'u co'e}, where the content of co'e has to be glorked.
The pragmatic contexts where they would tend to be used
are probably different. For example, with lo'ei, although
the higher co'e could be construed as jetnu, so effectively
vacuous, gricean principles would implicate something non
vacuous. So, for example, I would tend to interpret
{mi citka lo'ei plise} as habitual -- "It is habitual
that mi citka lo plise" -- because otherwise one could
equally well say {mi citka lo plise}.
How would you tend to interpret {mi citka loi'e plise}?
Doesn't it also suggest habituality? The problem is that
the unmarked form should have been lo'ei/loi'e, not {lo}.
Similarly, while I might say {loi'e merko -president cu
nanmu}, {loi'e merko -president cu -quaker} implicates that
generally US presidents are quakers, given the reasonable
premise that when you abstract away from the tokens to get
the type, it is the properties that are more common among
the tokens that survive.
And the same applies to {lo'ei merko -president}, doesn't it?
In other words, it seems to me that the abstraction to worlds
where there is only one broda is very similar if not identical
to the vagueness introduced by not looking at the extension.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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