Return-Path: Message-Id: <9110081858.AA12722@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Tue Oct 8 18:09:04 1991 Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Subject: Re: Aorist To: John Cowan , Ken Taylor , List Reader In-Reply-To: (Your message of Tue, 08 Oct 91 11:44:08 EDT.) <23434.9110081832@ucl.ac.uk Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Tue Oct 8 18:09:04 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!cuvma.bitnet!LOJBAN Were these different Skt tenses equivalent (& different) in the way I like beans Beans I like. John kissed Mary Mary was kissed by John. are? Or was there really no difference whatever? Synonymy is very rare in language, so I either doubt yr claim, or wonder whether you're speaking of a time at which Skt was dead & had developed into the Prakrits & was used only as a classical tongue. If scholars chose to apply the label 'aorist' to some tense, this does suggest that at some time it was associated with imperfective aspect, no? >its Skt name), was traditionally used for "past tense at which I was not >present", as opposed to past tense observed by the narrator (and, by >extension, it was also used for cases in which the narrator felt he wasn't >there owing to mental disorientation, as drunkenness. The example my book >had was "I babbled like an idiot before the king". Even though the speaker >was present, this form might be used stylistically). This is very interesting. Is this presence/absence feature isolated, or is it part of a larger system of evidential modality? If the verb with the presence/absence feature occurs within a subordinate clause (e.g. _Sophy knew that Arthur wept_), does this mean that the speaker was present/absent with respect to Arthur's weeping, or could it mean that Sophy was present/absent? Can lojban show the difference? Do its evidentials & other modal particles have an argument for perceiver, believer, obligator, etc., that defaults to 'speaker' but can be specified as someone else (Sophy in the above example)? ---------- And.