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From: Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:53:08 -0400
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On Thursday, April 25, 2013 10:38:51 John E Clifford wrote:
> Don't know about walls and benches.  The four points (axes) are Present,
> Future, Retropresent ("Past") and Retrofuture and the three arrows are
> Retrospective, Prospective and Immediate, radiating from each axis.  All
> axes are displacements for Present, all vectors are views from an axis.  No
> language has the whole system intact and purely tense (I couldn't get it
> into Lojban, alas -- or logic either).  It keeps slopping over into aspects
> and subjunctives (as in most familiar languages).  Logically, the crucial
> factors here are that different axes have different extensions of "exist"
> and events vectored from an axis involve existents of that axis, while
> events at displaced axes may involve things existing then but not at
> Present (in particular).  All sorts of other restrictions and violations
> occur, but this is the basic stuff.

How is retrofuture different from past? What is "retropresent" supposed to 
mean? What do the arrows do? What about spatial tenses?

> From the orthodox chat, the crucial thing about SAE languages is their
> Fregean semantics, the world consists of things with holes and things to
> plug the holes, giving a metaphysics of isolated (and generally
> characterless) individuals and properties (etc.) that they take on.  This
> contrasts with languages which go for properties only that intersect and
> overlap and absorb, and those which simply have processes, and perhaps
> those which merely have instantaneous sensations.  The existence of
> languages of any of these types is questionable and the question may well
> be unintelligible, but without it, there is no SWH.

What is the world of Hebrew like? That's the only non-SAE natlang that I know 
a fair bit of.

By "properties only that intersect ..." do you mean "lo ckaji poi po'o kruca 
..."? The only restriction on the properties is that they intersect and 
overlap and absorb? I would not normally put "only" there, and it took me a 
while to figure out what it means.

Pierre
-- 
lo ponse be lo mruli ku po'o cu ga'ezga roda lo ka dinko

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