From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Wed Oct 9 10:16:18 1991 Return-Path: Date: Wed Oct 9 10:16:18 1991 Message-Id: <9110091349.AA28163@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: Aorist X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: And Rosta's message of Tue, 8 Oct 1991 19:53:51 +0000 Status: RO And asks about the finer points of purported synonymy in Skt. I guess I should start watching my mouth a little more closely before I start discoursing on the minutiae of Sanskrit grammar and semantics. After all, I only studied it for a year, and I don't really have the right to be such an authority. And writes: >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 English, of course, word-order is very important and the passive form of a sentence carries a very different load than the active. Sanskrit has many cases, so word-order was freer and carries less semantic loading (though I'd guess it still means something). Compare Latin (I won't, 'cause I don't know it). Likewise the passive. It doesn't seem to carry the same heavy semantic load that it does in English, though it is certainly noted and marked (different verb form and the cases of "subject" and "object" change). (Sometimes, with irregular verbs, the grammar works out such that you can't tell whether a verb is in active or passive form, and there's a whole class of verb stems (4rth?) about which it has been proposed that they developed from passive constructions owing to their form and sometimes meaning.) I guess that, on the whole, I'd better back away from my "Synonymy" stand before my foot gets wedged too deep in my mouth. Ditto vocabulary synonymy. I can think of some half-dozen words for "king", and I'm *sure* there were some connotational (and even denotational) differences among them, tho they were used in texts interchangably to describe the same person. One thing that used to strike me as funny was when my textbook would use two words to demonstrate different grammatical features, in contrast, and gave the same translation for both. I thought Prakrit was later than Sanskrit (as I think its name implies: Prakrit speaks of being "basic" or something, while Sanskrit means "refined"). Whatever. I'll have to look up some details on that "not-before-me" past tense, though I doubt I'll be able to get you much on it. Lojbab can probably give you more examples on what Lojban would do about these things than you'd ever want. I can tell you that Sansrit rarely used indirect quotation, even in non-speaking subordinate clauses. So your sentence would likely get translated "'Arthur wept.' [this] Sophy knew." Lojban does all sorts of weird things with its extended tense grammar and its attitudinals. Nick, Lojbab, and I have recently (off-line) had a similar discussion wrt the Lojban attitudinal "kau", which indicates knowledge. I felt that using it within a subordinate clause it still refers to the speaker, not the actor in the clause, or at least that it was very unclear. Bob and Nick felt that it referred to the actor in the clause (at least in the case we were dealing with, where the sentence was something like "he knew that something (known!) ...") Bob said that these things could be helped by using the "self-oriented" and "non-self-oriented" attitudinals, which are reserved for reference to the speaker. ~mark