WikiDiscuss

pc:
> You really have to settle down on what this locution means — or,
> I suspect, get better about saying what that is.

I'll try. {lo broda} is, first and foremost, a constant term,
just like {la brod.} is a constant term.

lo ractu can be seen and touched. That means "rabbits can be seen
and touched".
la ract can be seen and touched. That means "Rasht can be seen and
touched".

When you see or touch an instance of lo ractu, you are, in the
very same act, seeing or touching lo ractu.
When you see or touch a stage of la ract, you are, in the very
same act, seeing or touching la ract.

(A "stage" differs from a "slice" in that a stage has some time depth,
so a stage is a series of contiguous slices. The analogy of instances
with stages seems better than the analogy with slices, which, having
zero time depth, are somewhat unreal. The best analogy is perhaps that
of stages of individuals with instances of substances, because two
time-contiguous stages give you one longer stage, two space-contiguous
instances give you one bigger instance of the substance.)

lo ractu cu zasti. Rabbits are real/actual.
la ract cu zasti. Rasht is real/actual.

For the above to be true, it is necessary that some instance
of lo ractu and some stage of la ract are real/actual, too. That's
just how {zasti} works. You can't zasti if you don't have some
instance/stage that zasti.

lo pavyseljirna cu xanri. Unicorns are imaginary.
la pavyseljirn cu xanri. Pavyseljirn is imaginary.

Imaginary things don't have real instances/stages. They may
or may not have imaginary instances/stages, depending on how
elaborately they are imagined.

> The juggling to get something
> externally generalizable out of such expressions is also then just a trick
> that needlessly — and misleadingly — hides what is going on: the
> generalization on, e.g., {le ka pavyseljirna} (I do agree that the gadri
> there is otiose, even odious).

The "Mr" talk is one way of conceptualizing things. As long as
{lo broda} behaves like a constant term (i.e. it is transparent
to negation, it can be repeated with anaphora, etc) then it
doesn't matter much how one conceptualizes it. That such a thing
is needed is evident to anyone who has used the language to some
extent. It is extremely cumbersome to reduce all your claims to
instances when in very many cases the distribution of instances
is obvious or irrelevant. When we do want to go into instances,
all the usual machinery remains available: we simply quantify
over all of them with {PA lo broda}, or refer to a specific
instance or group of instances directly with le/la.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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