Lambert or Saccheri quadrilaterals as single primitive notions for plane hyperbolic geometry

With the aim of revealing their purely geometric nature, we rephrase two theorems of S. Yang and A. Fang [S. Yang, A. Fang, A new characteristic of Möbius transformations in hyperbolic geometry, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 319 (2006) 660–664] characterizing Möbius transformations as definability results in elementary plane hyperbolic geometry. We show not only that elementary plane hyperbolic geometry can be axiomatized in terms of the quaternary predicates λ or σ, with λ(abcd) to be read as ‘abcd is a Lambert quadrilateral’ and σ(abcd) to be read as ‘abcd is a Saccheri quadrilateral’, but also that all elementary notions of hyperbolic geometry can be positively defined (i.e. by using only quantifiers (∀ and ∃) and the connectives ∨ and ∧ in the definiens) in terms of λ or σ.