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la adam cusku di'e
I think you are conflating 'lo'i' and 'le'i'; the lions relevant to the situation as defined by the speaker is 'le'i cinfo'. 'lo'i' at least attempts to make some kind of a quasi-objective consideration of all lions.
Maybe, but I don't think so. {le'i} is the set of things the
speaker is talking about. This is normally a small set (most
often a singleton, if not then with two, three, four, a very
small number of members, rarely a large number of members).
The singularizer normally does not work on a particular
subset that the speaker has in mind. The properties of
the singularized broda are blurred from those of all broda,
but how this is done depends on the situation at hand.
The speaker does not select a subset and then singularize
from that. The properties are drawn most heavily from the
most relevant cases. In the general case "the Lion lives
in Africa", we are discussing properties of the species
and it makes sense to ignore artificial cases like lions
living in zoos.
But consider again the lion that was about to eat you. Let's
say you get away, and that the following year you meet a
friend who invites you to the zoo to show you a lion. This
zoo did not have a lion before. The dialogue could go
something like this:
coi adam i le dalpanka ca se xabju lo'e cinfo vau uo
Hi Adam! The zoo now has the Lion at last!
i mi na nelci cy
I don't like the Lion.
i xu do se slabu cy
Are you familiar with the Lion?
i go'i i mi pu penmi cy
Yes, I've met the Lion before.
Now, the individual lion that was about to eat you a year ago
is probably not the one in the zoo, but this is irrelevant in
this conversation. Of course, your friend could have used
{lo cinfo} to say that there is a lion in the zoo, but then
you could not say that you don't like "it". And he was then
asking if you are familiar with lions in general, not with
the particular lion of the zoo. And then the one you met in
particular is not the lions he is asking whether you are familiar
with, nor is it the lions in general that you don't like. So
the conversation could have gone some other way, with different
gadri in different places and an inability to use a pronoun, but
is it really necessary to complicate it so much when all the
relevant facts here are just about the one Lion?
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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