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la adam cusku di'e
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).
The problem with that is that nonsingular {le} terms are harder
to manipulate scopewise, so by allowing the possibility of
plural with {le} we are actually complicating the understanding
of the sentence quite a bit. It would be different if the default
for singletons was either {lei broda} or {le'e broda}, because
these two, being always singular terms, are easy to deal with for
scope purposes even with an underlying non-singleton set. So if I
were to abandon the "{le} is {le pa} in practice if not in theory"
implication, I would have to switch 95% of its use to {lei} or
{le'e}, because I want the flexibility of a singular term for the
most common terms.
<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>
I wouldn't mind getting our hands on {lau}, {tau} and several
others to put them to some use, but I'm not convinced this one
would be useful. Referring to inherently singular sets with
in-mind gadri is perfectly reasonable: if you know they are
inherently singular, you cannot help its reference being specific.
The only reason to use {lau} would be when you additionally
want to point out and emphasize this inherent uniqueness, and for
that there is {lo pa}, {loi pa} or {lo'e pa}, any of which
correspond to your definition for {lau}. If pointing out the
singletonhood is important, it is proper to have to add the inner
{pa}. {lau} would make sense as a singular gadri in my opinion
only if it was also +specific, so that you could also use it
for singleton in-mind sets. In that case it would take over the
role {le} plays now, and {le} would be left for not necessarily
singleton in-mind sets taken distributively, which is used
relatively much less frequently than {le pa}, for the very good
reason that it is much harder to process.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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