From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Fri Oct 11 14:28:56 1991 Return-Path: Date: Fri Oct 11 14:28:56 1991 Message-Id: <9110111756.AA16880@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: cliva X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: jimc%MATH.UCLA.EDU@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu's message of Fri, 11 Oct 1991 09:54:45 -0700 Status: RO I'm kind of in-between lojbab and jimc here. "cliva" gives me problems, 'cause after all, you are going *someplace*, if only "anywhere that's not here". And the asymmetry bothers me too, though I admit that there *is* more justification for "cliva" than the analogous "come" "litru", however, really does have a right to exist. That fact that the planets may someday stop moving doesn't mean they're necessarily going to a prticular place. They're merely moving, and that's all that's important to this gismu: simply that the actor undergoes spatial movement wrt the observer, whether or not such movement ever started or ended. Even if you know for a fact that the motion started and will end, but the origin and destination are more than just unspecified or irrelavant, but actually distracting, I'd use "litru". F'rinstance, if I were trying to translate "a bird flies through the sky", I'd use "lo cipni cu voirli'u lo tsani" (a bird flyingly-travels by-route a sky). Very, very few birds (leastways, none that I've met) are immortal and eternally flying, so the thing must have started someplace and will eventually light somewhere, but I'd use "litru" anyway. This is because I'm not trying to get across the fact that the bird if going someplace, only that it's in motion. This is hard to put into words properly; I hope you get the picture. ~mark