Re: general response on needing books

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Jorge replying to me:
> I don't believe there is anything like "local specificity", or
> specificity inside an abstraction. Specificity concerns the speaker
> and the audience, and the only way you have more than one level of
> these is with quotations.
>
> > My point is precisely
> > that there is a difference, & one worth making expressible in
> > Lojban.
>
> Then please describe a situation where such a use would make sense,
> and write a Lojban sentence using your proposed xi'i with {le}.

Le prenu cu jinvi le duhu xihile cukta cu blanu

The person thinks "the book is blue". To find out which book, you'd
have to ask the person, not me the speaker. The referent of xihile
cukta is 'in mind' but the mind is the person's, not the speaker's.

> > > You mean that for {lo} the xihi-less quantification would be outside
> > > the abstraction? I think that goes against current usage.
> >
> > This is what I mean. I suppose it could be the other way around,
> > but this would be needed less often.
>
> I would have thought that local quantification was the norm, but that's
> only an impresion.

You need local quantification or reference-assignment only when it
is in a clause subordinate to an irrealis element of meaning (i.e.
something whose argument is not necessarily the case). And in most
utterances there won't be such an element. However, when there is
such an element you may indeed be right that local rather than
outermost quantification is more often what is wanted.

----
And