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Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2015 10:21:32 -0400
From: Jacob Thomas Errington <tsani@mail.jerrington.me>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] seca'o
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On 08/31/2015 09:28 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> On Monday, August 31, 2015 21:39:23 Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
>> Neither {fi'o ... fe'u} constructs. Why can't they be tenses?
> They are an open class equivalent to BAI. The selbri inside can be converted
> with SE.

Why does being an open class forbid them from being what we call "tense" 
in Lojban? I would reckon that in Lojban, there is no grammatical tense. 
Instead you just have predicates, some of which have nice syntactic 
sugar in the form of the "tense" classes PU, ZA, etc.

.i mi pu lo nu sipna cu citka -> .i lo nu mi citka cu purci lo nu mi 
sipna + the implication that "citka" is claimed.

Tense is thus already only loosely a grammatical construct in Lojban, 
and under the unified tags proposal becomes even less so. In fact, if 
all fi'o constructs form bridi operators and all TAG cmavo have 
expansions in terms of fi'o constructs, then tense is no longer a closed 
grammatical construct at all in Lojban.

Does this matter?
I don't think so.

If you make up a general word for tense as in "words or constructs that 
affect the interpretation of when or where an event takes place", then 
all fi'o-constructs (and by extension all TAG) are "tenses" in this sense.
If you make up a more specific word for tense as in "specifically closed 
grammatical constructs that affect the interpretation of where or where 
an event takes place", then Lojban doesn't have "tenses".

It looks to me like you're after the latter sense.

So define the following:

gernrtensi = x1 is a grammatical tense marker or construct ...

and fill in the "..." with whatever places you'd think are necessary.

To talk about generalized Lojban tenses, it turns out you can say {ma'oi 
.tag.}. I've done this in the past, but I'm not hugely fond of it since 
it's essentially an English loanword.

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

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