From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Thu Oct 10 20:09:04 1991 Return-Path: Date: Thu Oct 10 20:09:04 1991 Message-Id: <9110102357.AA10878@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: cliva X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO Bob Chassell gave a good answer or two on Bruce's question, but may not have fully answered what Bruce was asking. You fire a gun into the air. The bullet leaves the chamber. Where is it 'going to'? Nowhere in particular. Sure, it will probably stop moving sometime, but when we talk about 'cliva' we are making no claim. Hmmm. Maybe I should have said "NASA fired a Pioneer into interstellar space." When you leave a party, you must inherently leave by some route. it is irrelevant to the claim 'Bruce left the party' where you ended up. (Lojban is not symmetric, by the way - it has no 'arrive' gismu, though there was a lot of debate. One could claim that we thus have a bias towards Big Bang or Creationism, since we presume in the existing set of words that every motion has a starting point. But of course if someone needs it, they'll add the word. Chris Handley pointed this up. I would answer him by using 'gravity' or 'launching joi falling joi rocket/jet' as the means, or simply say that they fallingly-travel (farlu litru), which ignore how they got there. The lujvo for this might indeed drop the 'from' and 'to' places of 'farlu' because the point of the lujvo is to eliminate, not add. (Another place where dikyjvo don't work). In complex systems (actually in all of them) the orbiting objects fall around their center of gravity. (They all move by some route though - who cares whether they chose it?) But language, outside of extreme technical situations (I don't want to raise relativistic tenses again), is intended for everyday human communication. So are our place structures. lojbab