From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sat Nov 26 09:13:47 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:13:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.54) id 1Eg3cR-0004Tq-Ko for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:13:47 -0800 Received: from manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr ([139.179.30.24]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.54) id 1Eg3cO-0004Tj-T6 for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:13:47 -0800 Received: by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix, from userid 72) id 0183F270A9; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:13:41 +0200 (EET) Received: from [139.179.97.195] (unknown [139.179.97.195]) by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix) with ESMTP id E4AEA26F87 for ; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:13:41 +0200 (EET) Message-ID: <4388A58B.6060300@bilkent.edu.tr> Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:12:27 +0200 From: robin User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6-7.1.20060mdk (X11/20050322) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Schwa. References: <20051114112350.48230.qmail@web51506.mail.yahoo.com> <20051114151923.GA575@beverly.caldwell.out> <2d3df92a0511160541l8ce4d74y26c8edc556319ac3@mail.gmail.com> <4386EC5A.5090705@bilkent.edu.tr> <2d3df92a0511260614j3b181ca4i5af1b8a45358134@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <2d3df92a0511260614j3b181ca4i5af1b8a45358134@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: -2.5 (--) X-archive-position: 2690 X-Approved-By: robin@bilkent.edu.tr X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: robin@bilkent.edu.tr Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners HeliodoR wrote: > That's a matter of opinion - many linguists would say that English has > only two tenses: present and past. The rest is done with modal verbs > (e.g. "will") and aspect (e.g. perfective). If you look at English > "tenses" as combinations of tense and aspect, the Lojban way of doing > things seems a little less strange. > > > Yes. And much more systematic. > Thanks for this info, anyway. > I've heard that every (*every*!) language has past tense. Which is a bit > surprising if You think of that not all of them break up to words. (Some > really weird langs consist of elements that sign almost whole sentences.) I'm also not sure that Chinese time particles ("le", "guo" etc.) are really tenses as we understand them. They seem rather more like Lojban event contours, but [ga'inai] that could be the result of my limited knowledge of Chinese. robin.tr