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Jorge Llambias wrote:
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.
Exactly. I am saying that when the singularizer seems to be working on a particular subset of lo'i broda, le'ei/lei'e broda is a much more apt description.
> The properties of
the singularized broda are blurred from those of all broda, but how this is done depends on the situation at hand.
I think that the idea of loi'e/lei'e is that given a particular set which the abstraction is based on, the abstraction will be more or less the same each time it is used. The idea is to make a claim about lions in general (for loi'e cinfo), which is not possible if the abstraction changes in major ways depending on context.
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.
If the sets on which the abstraction is based have internal structure such that some members are more central than others (which is not the case with mathematical sets), I think that that internal structure is something which should be considered as objective and not affected by the context (though of course the exact details of how two different people see the internal structure may differ). Thus, I can see saying that adult lions in the wild are more central than lion cubs in the zoo to 'lo'i cinfo', but not that the lion about to eat me is more central than some lion lying on the veld and licking its paws. It is not "more of a lion" to me, though of course it concerns me much more just at that time. I think that the proper use of 'le'i' and abstractions based on it is to get such context-dependent subsets.
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".
No, but I could say that I don't like loi'e cinfo, and since that is an abstraction based on lo'i cinfo, of which that particular lion in the zoo is a member, it is at least to some degree included. I think that 'lo'ei' is far more general than 'loi'e', and thus 'broda lo'ei' broda will always be true if 'broda loi'e broda', but not necessarily the other way around. The conversation could continue something like this: '.i mi na nelci loi'e cinfo' -- '.i xu do se slabu loi'e cinfo' -- '.i na go'i .i ku'i mi pu penmi le cinfo .i banzu' Here it comes out that my dislike for lions is not based on an acquaintance with lions in general, but with an acquaintance of a specific lion.
And he was then asking if you are familiar with lions in general, not withthe particular lion of the zoo.
Yes, and since we are using me as an example, I am not familiar with lions in general, and wouldn't be even if I had a near-death experience with a particular one. However, 'lo'ei cinfo' does not mean lions in general, so while I might answer as you have suggested, it would not imply that I am familiar with lions in general.
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.
All of your sentences in the example are true, because of the extreme generality of 'lo'ei', but the sentences refer to a different abstraction each time. In the first sentence, 'lo cinfo' is appropriate; in the second two 'loi'e cinfo', and in the last 'le cinfo', because I am thinking of a specific lion. Of course, we could use 'lo'ei cinfo' in every circumstance and just glork any other necessary information (there are surely languages that do something like that), but since we have all these different gadri, I think we should use them properly.
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?
Perhaps this is part of the source of our mutual misunderstandings, but can you use 'the Lion' in English in that way? To me, 'the Lion' (whether capitalized or not) always corresponds to Lojban 'le pa cinfo'. To translate 'lo'ei' into English I would use either 'lions' or 'a lion', but never 'the lion', though I am familiar with such usage of a singular definite noun in Esperanto and Hebrew.
mu'o mi'e .adam.