A modest proposal #2: verdicality

[Dylan Thurston <dpt@abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>]

{ga'inai loi satcyselsku zo'u stidi}

[The attitudinal paper mentions {galtu} w.r.t ga'i, which seems
malglico.  {tolbanli}, maybe?]

[I'd like to stick in a tense for "prematurely", but I couldn't find
one.  Why isn't there a distinction:  natural beginning vs. real
beginning?]

If I understand correctly, the usage of {le broda} as "that which I
choose to say brodas" was introduced to mimic [with reason] a feature of
natlangs:  one can say "the cat in the painting", even though that cat
is not, strictly speaking a cat, but only an image of a cat.

There is a looseness here (clearly necessary for succinct
communication).  Lojban analyses it as being a looseness in the
description.  I'd like to argue that, instead, it's a looseness in the
predication "cat".

Consider another example: a painting of a man walking across a field.
How would one express the English sentence

        The man is carrying a heavy load.

in Lojban?  The man is not a man, but that is covered by the use of {le
ninmu}; but neither is he carrying anything.  The appropriate Lojban
gismu, {bevri}, requires a source, destination and route and hence
movement (IMHO anomalously, but that's another issue), of which there is
none in the static painting.

But this is just the ordinary loose way of speaking, expressed in Lojban
by the cnima'o {sa'enai}.  Just because Lojban is intended to be a
logical language doesn't mean that speakers have to be pedantically
strict (unless, of course, they say so, with {sa'e}).

So I'd like to see some justification for why the verdical/non-verdial
distinction must be made with every reference to {le/lo toldi}.  Other
distinctions make sense:  the difference indivual/mass/set/ideal affects
the semantics of the rest of the sentence (though I don't understand the
difference between mass and set yet), and it's clearly necessary to make
the distinction between quantified (existential) and specific
references.  But I don't see why +/-verdical distinction has to be there
when it can just as easily be made with a cnima'o following the brivla.

If this has been discussed before, my apologies.

c'o mi'e. dilyn.