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Subject: Re: [lojban] seca'o
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From: Jacob Errington <tsani@mail.jerrington.me>
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Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2015 12:34:03 -0400
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On 09/04/2015 07:10 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 10:21:32 Jacob Thomas Errington wrote:
>> 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.
>
> In that sentence, "pu" is a preposition. In "mi pu citka", it's a tense
> marker.
>

I think that in Lojban that distinction is rather arbitrary. I'll show 
why below. It might be an interesting distinction to talk about (I would 
personally like a way to say "tags used before a selbri"), but the 
interpretations of these constructs are the same.


>> 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.
>
> I don't agree with the unified tags proposal. A tense marker may have roughly
> the same meaning as a fi'o construct, but they're not identical in meaning,
> unlike a BAI preposition.

Can you show me that they are not identical in meaning? Furthermore, the 
preposition form and the tense marker form, as you call them, have the 
same interpretations.

.i mi pu citka |->
.i mi pu zo'e citka |->
( .i mi fi'o se purci zo'e citka |-> )
.i lo nu mi citka cu purci + mi citka

If we establish pu = fi'o se purci, then we get the third reduction, in 
parentheses.

Regardless, this is exactly how BAI are interpreted, as well as certain 
fi'o-constructs.

.i mi mu'i lo nu na carvi cu klama lo zarci |->
.i mi fi'o mukti lo nu na carvi cu klama lo zarci |->
.i lo nu na carvi cu mukti lo nu mi klama lo zarci + mi klama lo zarci

.i mi fi'o na djica lo mamta cu klama lo nunsla |->
.i lo mamta na djica lo nu mi klama lo nunsla + mi klama lo nunsla

 From these reduction schemes, we can see that the interpretation 
schemes for tense markers, prepositions, BAI, and whatever other name we 
can give to these things are the same.

>
>> gernrtensi = x1 is a grammatical tense marker or construct ...
>>
>> and fill in the "..." with whatever places you'd think are necessary.
>
> Is that including aspect or not?
>

Beats me! It's a made up word for your use case, not mine, so you get to 
choose. Make it as broad or as specific as you like. Chances are it will 
only encompass some subset of the unified tags, which is probably fine 
since you want to be able to discuss natlang tenses, aspects, etc.

> On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 17:34:00 Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
>> Do they include only cmavo? Which selma'o do they cover? I'd like to know
>> what exactly you mean by "tense" and "aspect" because personally I don't
>> see any need in such words except for teaching purposes but then they don't
>> need Lojban words.
>
> Even if Lojban doesn't have tense or aspect (which it does), we should be able
> to talk in Lojban about tense and aspect of languages which do have them.
>

I agree with gleki on the idea that using words like "tense" and 
"aspect" for teaching lojban grammar is probably unnecessary. Showing 
the reduction schemes is a sufficient demonstration of how to interpret 
these.

I agree with you too piier, on the idea that we should have words to 
discuss natlang grammatical concepts. Make up a fu'ivla or zi'evla and 
let us know what you choose.

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

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