Subject: Re: [lojban] le ga'ifanta

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 06:45:59 -0400

At 03:00 AM 05/23/2000 -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > Anyhow, <pu'o> is the mirror image of <ba'o>, causes all together but 
> not yet
> > actually begun, "is about to." This does not apply to the end of the 
> freeze;
> > almost none of the causes are in place -- an adequate-sized group of
> > competent lb speakers, for instance. <pu'o> has the advantage over 
> <ba> that
> > it does not commit you to the event actually happening, but that force of
> > <ba> is mitigated by the general uncertainty of the future and could 
> here be
> > further diluted by some weasly epistemolgical flag, "they say," or 
> so. Of
> > course, here the point is to lay down the ruling, not make a 
> prediction, so a
> > stronger but less specific form might be appropriate: "if it ever ends, it
> > will be after at least five years after..."
>
>I don't read that much into pu'o! I know it as "in the future, and not in
>the past or now."

No. That is punaijecanaijeba. pu'o says nothing about the present or past 
except by implicature. The perfective tenses, being arranged about an 
event, ignore those portions of the timeline that are not relevant to the 
event. If you are in such a part of the timeline, you cannot use 
perfective tenses to discuss them.

Now normally you can arbitrarily make any time after an event be "ba'o" 
that event by mere mention, though talking about the present as "ba'o the 
Neanderthals" seems rather off unless I am talking about the current music 
scene zo'o. But as pc said, not every time before an event has happened is 
it pu'o that event - you need some sense that the conditions are in place 
or are about to be in place to initiate the event. Now is not "pu'o a 
faster than light drive", though it might be "pu'o the heat death of the 
universe" since the necessary conditions are all in place.

lojbab
----
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org