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Jordan:
> I think that this is universally accepted for uses without a specified
> inner quantifier (which is 99.9% of the usage of lo). However I
> the following is the more general way to put it, which keeps the
> inner quantifier information intact:
> PA1 lo PA2 broda == PA1 da poi ke'a cmima lo'i PA2 broda
>
> On this subject, we were discussing on irc a while back over whether
> PA1 le gerku ==? PA1 da voi ke'a gerku
> or
> PA1 le PA2 gerku ==? PA1 da poi ke'a cmima le'i PA2 gerku
> make sense, and such things
I favour the second of these, as discussed on the list a couple of
weeks ago.
> I wonder if anyone can answer to my problems with each of these:
> In my view, it's easy to show that the first one is broken if you
> use the default quantifier for le:
> ro da voi ke'a gerku
> certainly does not seem (to me) to imply that we're talking about
> a (probably small) set of things which may or may not be dogs, and
> I think it also loses the implication that the speaker knows exactly
> which things (which are being called dogs) she's talking about
Exactly so. {da voi} gives you nonveridicality but not specificity.
To paraphrase {le broda} with voi, we need something like {le du voi
broda}, using {le} to preserve the specificity, and du as an effectively
empty selbri.
> The second one fixes the problem of the inner quantifier, and of
> implying knowing which things are in the set being talked about (by
> using le'i). However, if we use a nondefault quantifier on le, I
> think it is implied that the speaker knows which members of le'i
> gerku are being discussed:
> re le gerku cu xagji .ijeku'i pa le gerku puzi citka lo mlatu
> talks about a specific pair of gerku, not just {re da poi cmima
> le'i gerku} (some pair of dogs from the set)
>
> Anyone have answers for these?
I don't understand why you read {re le gerku} in this way. It means
{lo re le gerku} = {re da poi cmima le'i gerku}. You seem to be
reading it as {le re le gerku} = {le re du poi ke'a cmima le'i
gerku} or else as {le re du ku poi ke'a cmima le'i gerku} (if
membership of le'i gerku is meant veridically).
--And.