Subject: Re: [lojban] Opposite of za'o

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 21:42:22 EDT

In a message dated 00-06-30 19:55:06 EDT, xorxes writes:

<< >But isn't {na za'o} either ungrammatical or exactly equivalent to {zo'o 
>na},
>{na} having to occur immediately before the predicate and yet govering the
>whole bridi?

It is both grammatical and (I think) not equivalent.

{na} can alternate with as many tenses as it pleases, and
the whole thing occurs immediately before the predicate and
governs the whole bridi.>>

Yes, after three records on this, you'd think I would get used to it.

<<{na roroi} should be equipollent to {su'oroi na}. >>

But this apparently not, since the negation boundary with {na} is at the 
leftmost of the prefix, so moving its actual place in the sentence does not 
affect its scope. DeMorgan is not to be used (nor the corresponding thing 
with quantifiers). To make that move requires {naku} (Ch. 15, sec. 4, etc.).

In a message dated 00-06-30 19:44:27 EDT, xorxes writes:

<< It may be as you say, but to me
"still" has a strong component of "beyond expectation". >>

But {za'o} is not about expectations exactly, but rather about the contour of 
events (treated systematically as though objective -- we rejected the 
intentional interpretation, which I am not sure would help here anyhow). 
This is starting to sound like an attitudinal -- impatience (not either anger 
nor surprise seems to fit)? 
In most of the examples of {za'o} the reading "keep on" makes sense, though 
it does not with many of the "still" cases "Still" seems often to be about 
time limits rather than inherent limits -- and a subjective sense of time 
limits to boot. Thus it seems to be interchangeable in some contexts with 
"yet," which, however, is both more hopeful (suggesting more than "still" 
that it will happen) and more worried. And these again suggest attidudinals 
rather than aspects are involved.

<<>I can be in High Point,
>with my car still running, and be still on my way to Pineville even though 
>mi
>na za'o klama py.

Why would you say that you were still on your way, if there
was no expectation that you should no longer be on your way?>>

Aside from thinking this is an odd way to go to Pineville (does sticking to 
the interstates really make it that much a better trip? even at an extra 
hundred miles or so?), it is clear that he has not overtravelled at this 
point ({na za'o} is true, though an understatement). If his intended goal is 
Pineville, then, if he gets not farther, the trip ends before it is finished 
(and it would make no sense to insist that what ended was a trip to High 
Point, since that one -- which he did not have in mind to take -- was 
completed) ({co'u}). The fact that he is not going any farther on that trip 
is why it is stopped, not why it was not that trip at all.