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(This is a note I sent to the Loglan email list: Loglanists@UCSD.) I've been trying to figure out the difference between da, de, di, do, du and ba, be, bo, bu. Loglan 1 and Loglan 3 both sort of gloss over the differences between the two. But as nearly as I can figure the usage should be as follows. Da, de, di, do and du refer to specific things or specific persons in Loglan sentences. In this sense, they represent (or act as replacements for) words like "he", "she", "they", "the apple", etc... in English. It seems to me that this is one of the duplicate features of Loglan because certianly words like afi or bei would serve as well. Ba, be, bo and bi, on the other hand, are little more than place holders for the blanks that surround Loglan predicates. They do not refer to any specific thing or person. One could say that they are contentless arguments. Can anyone confirm if I've got this right? And I have another question. If a word like "ba" exists to act as a completely indefinite argument, are there similar words that act as completely indefinite predicates? To illustrate what I mean, let me define a series of indefinte predicate words: nulna, nulne, nulni, nulno and nulnu. Then a Loglan sentence like "Ba nulna be" would be translated into English as "There is some sort of a relationship between one something and a second something." This is pretty vague but if "ba" exists then I suppose there would be a reason for such series of predicates to exist. Please let me know. Tom.