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de'i li 2002-10-26 ti'u li 16:45:00 la'o zoi. Jorge Llambias .zoi cusku di'e
>The second consequence is that because singleton in-mind
>sets are so frequent, when there is an occasion to use
>a non-singleton in mind set distributively, {le} tends to
>feel inadequate. How do I make sure it is not taken as a
>singleton in this particular occasion?
If you are talking about in-mind sets which happen to be
singleton, but which in principle need not be, I think
that this is probably substratum influence on the way we
conceptualize 'le broda'. I think we should force ourselves
to use bare, unmarked 'le broda' even when that is plural,
and hopefully we will get used to evaluating it as possibly
plural. This would be made easier if 'le' ceased to be used
for inherently singleton sets (see below).
>So, again, when {lo'i} is a singleton I keep using {le}.
>In principle, any of the six articles would serve for
>these singleton categories. But, given that singleton
>categories are very frequent in in-mind sets and rare in
>general sets, it makes sense to choose one of the in-mind
>articles for this function and use it throughout, unless
>for some reason we want to emphasize that it is intrinsically
>a singleton category in which case {lo pa} (or {loi pa}, or
>{lo'e pa}, it makes no difference) would be appropriate.
<ultra-radical-proposal>
What we need is a gadri for inherently singleton categories,
to take the burden off of 'le'. Unfortunately any cmavo
experimental in form would not be morphologically unmarked,
so that would not be a good solution for you. Therefore, I
(tentatively) propose that 'lau' could be used for this, since
no one uses it in its official meaning, and could be defined
thus:
lau broda cu brode <-->
da zo'u
ge
ge da broda gi da brode
gi
ro de zo'u
go
de broda
gi
de du da
i.e., Russell's iota operator or whatever it is called.
</ultra-radical-proposal>
mu'o mi'e .adam.