From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET  Thu Aug 19 12:41:49 1993
Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 19 Aug 1993 16:43:56 -0400
Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 19 Aug 1993 16:43:52 -0400
Message-Id: <199308192043.AA22867@eli.CS.YALE.EDU>
Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2)
   with BSMTP id 5704; Thu, 19 Aug 93 16:42:36 EDT
Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with
 BSMTP id 6378; Thu, 19 Aug 93 16:45:10 EDT
Date:         Thu, 19 Aug 1993 16:41:49 EDT
Reply-To: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU>
From: Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Jorge and Veijo once more on ZAhOs
X-To:         lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
To: Erik Rauch <rauch>
Status: O
X-Status: 

I said:

>     In a way it boils down to something like this: When you look at a
>     child, do you see the past or the future? Does an old man
>     represent the past or the future?
>

But Bob didn't like my metaphor:

> No, this is misleading, when concerned with ZAhO.  The old man does
> not directly represent anything to do with time.  Using {ba'o}, an old
> man is the aftermath of middle age.

That's what I meant, the old man is a "perfective" man, while the
child is an "inchoative" man. Now, we have to choose from "pu", and
"ba" their first name. (Their common surname is "'o".) Lojban calls the
child "pu'o" and the old man "ba'o", I would prefer the other way around.
i.e. instead of following the same man from childhood to old age, and
looking where he is at each point with respect to his prime, I prefer to
look at them both at the same time, and consider from there where is the
prime for each of them.

This is just a silly metaphor, I didn't mean to prove anything by it.
Both ways of naming them are legitimate from this point of view, since
we are not comparing their use as tenses.


> Past and future tense in the
> *usual* English meaning of the word `tense' has little to do with
> {ba'o} or {pu'o}---as little as it does with{na'onai} (atypically) or
> {zu'a} (left), both of which are Lojban tenses.

I think I repeated many times that I understand that the ZAhO do not
refer to time, but rather to the status of an event, but obviously
I'm not making myself clear.


>
> Veijo says it well and accurately:
>
>     A PU tense or a PU/ZAhO tcita tells WHERE (or rather WHEN) the
>     event is, a ZAhO tense tells rather WHAT KIND (the phase of) the
>     event is. The phase is actually the event we are talking about,
>     the event located with the PU tense and characterized with the
>     ZAhO 'tense'. There isn't anything else to look/go to. There is no
>     *future event, no past event, we are talking about the phase
>     event.
>
> Let me repeat that again: "There is no future event, no past event,
> we are talking about the phase event."
>

As I said when replying to Veijo, I totally agree with the above
paragraph.

Jorge