From Pycyn@aol.com Sun Jan 23 02:16:02 2000 X-Digest-Num: 343 Message-ID: <44114.343.1830.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 05:16:02 EST From: Pycyn@aol.com Subject: Re: Subjunctive? You're not just thinking English, except for thinking that the subjunctive is other than a grammatical category. The English (Latin, ...) subjunctives do a number of things, which are sorted out in Lojban to a number of cmavo. So, decide what you want to say and pick the appropriate device for doing it. Xorxes has, as usual, given a good starter list: for contrary-to-fact "conditionals" and past contemplated but undone actions (not, notice, a subjunctive even in English). Lojban tenses (ca,pu, ba, and compounds) are best taken as strictly truth-functional and linear, though there are arguments about the linear part and that allows for some "subjunctives." But better not to rely on that reading. So, puba *might* mean along some future path from some past time, and thus probably contrary to fact along the real (for us now anyhow) future to that past, but it is better to take it as being along the actual future to that past and thus either before, at, or after the present in the real stream of time. The virtues of puba and bapu are just that they don't tell us how the event is related to now, which is sometimes useful, when we don't know exactly: "He will have arrived by morning" (and for all I know is arrived already), etc. Most of the other compounds mirror the needs of a language which has obligatory tense, so needs compounds to move about in a narrative, as Lojban does not -- or not nearly so often. pc