From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:49:47 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Mon, 2 Aug 1993 23:23:12 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4677; Mon, 02 Aug 93 23:22:05 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 0052; Mon, 02 Aug 93 23:23:36 EDT Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 23:21:53 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: [long] Re: On the tense system X-To: jorge@phyast.pitt.edu X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Ukn Aug 2 23:23:13 1993 X-From-Space-Address: lojbab@GREBYN.COM Message-ID: the vowels of co'a and co'u (and co'i) have nothing to do with ba'o etc. and everything to do with the available cmavo at the time we assigned them. We did choose to use the simple metaphor (used elsewhere such as the numbers) of 'a' at the beginning and 'u' at the end - hence co'a and cou' and not vice versa. co'i is in a sense an "in the middle", though it really means more like "all of the time between start and end taken at once", hence was given the medial "i". Far more often than not, the Lojban cmavo have little system, and/or that system was constrained by the available words. We didn't have elaborate well-thought-out metaphors for assigning the words, but rather wanted to have simple mnemonics usually tied to gismu. We might have chosen to assign ba'o and pu'o in reverse, but that isn't the metaphor we thought of. I think in my case I internally transform mi pu'o klama to mi pu'o lenu klama and pu'o thense into the corresponding predicate (as yet unspecified) such that it translates I am in the anticipation period of the event of (me) going. This works semantically, but isn't something that people grasp on their own. I am undecided right now whether to teach it the way I think it or to watch how people who actually have a perfective system in their native language do teh teaching (I gained a much more thorough grasp of ZAhO when I learned Russian and relaized the usefulness of perfectives, especially when contrasted with the aorist ca/pu/ba, which I think have been malglico overused in historical Loglan and Lojban (Older Loglan versions had only the barest hint of a perfective system and it was a poorly analyzed copy of either the English or Esperanto system - I'm not sure which). lojbab