Re: le/lo

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

Lojbab:
> >You can say "lo xunre cu tcica lo brakarce": that would indeed
> >be metonymy, and is part and parcel of ordinary everyday
> >communication. By decoding the idea "some red thing cheated some
> >bus", the hearer can then take this idea to be a metonym, and
> >successfully infer the intended thought "the person with
> >the red bag cheated the bus company".
>
> I would not use metonymy unmarked in Lojban if I could help it.
> It is too easy to mark it, and doesn't leave you making fasle claims
> (which the unmarked version really is doing).  The listener shouldn't be
> obliged to determine that the speaker is speaking figuratively or
> metonymically.

That's up to you, but should not be a choice made by the speech
community in general. Figurative speech is ubiquitous in even
the most mundane discourse. Furthermore, many people would
argue that there is no real difference between figurative and
literal: some would reject the difference altogether, seeing
the difference is a matter of degree, with no boundary between
them, while others (including me) would say that the distinction
exists only under a certain ontology (which coexists with
alternative ontologies).

--And