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Looking for examples of usage of lo as Kind, I found
an interesting case, where it appears that loi, lo'e and lo
are all used for Kind in the same sentence. The sentence is
from the tikitikitembo translation by John Cowan, found at
http://www.lojban.org/files/texts/tikitiki
Anyone who has writen a long enough text in Lojban
(say 500 words) has almost certainly fallen into using lo
for Kind at some point.
.i loi jugypre pujeca te cmene lo'e pamoi panzi lo barda cmene
.i te cmene lo'e za'umoi panzi lo cmalu cmene
The intended meaning is quite clear. Indeed saying
{l* jugypre pujeca te cmene l* pamoi panzi l* barda cmene
.i te cmene l* za'umoi panzi l* cmalu cmene} is enough
to get the message across. All we want to say is
"Chinese people give first child long name, and give
non-first child short name". We could get into all
the details of how the avatars get distributed, say
"most Chinese that have children give to each of their
first child one long name, and to each of their
non-first child one short name", but even that is
not a full account of the distribution. We don't need
to get into those details, because we already know
that in general different avatars of people get
different avatars of names and so on. The only important
information here is to associate long name with first child
and short name with non-first child.
As written, with John's current understanding of lo'e,
the sentence would seem to say something like "there is
a group of Chinese people and some long name such that
those people acting together give the typical first child
that long name, and there's some short name such that they
give the typical non-first child that short name. Which seems
not to be what is wanted. With And's reading of lo'e it
is only a bit less nonsensical: There is a group of
Chinese people that give the typical first child a
long name and the typical non-first child a short name.
This one at least does not say that there is some long
name that is typical of the first child, but just that
the first child tipically has a long name. It still has
the problem that the same group of namers get to name
the typical child.
To make things more confusing, the last sentence of the
story is:
naukiku loi jugypre [cu] te cmene ro panzi le cmalu cmene
where now it seems that {le} is used for Kind too. (Unless
it really is supposed to say that all the children get the
same avatar of Mr. Short Name.)
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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