Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 05:56:30 -0500
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject: more on vi/fa'a/to'o
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To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Reply-to: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
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>> If I read it correctly, "vi le ckule zu'a(vi/va?) lo mitre be li cino"
>> should mean 30 meters left of the school, if Cowan doesn't contradict me
>> on how we interpret such a multiple tense-tagged sumti.
>
>What?!!!  Why would you give the magnitude to the direction marker and
>the direction to the magnitude marker?  And in the normal order
>direction comes first and then magnitude, (zu'ava), but as tcita you are
>giving first the magnitude (va) and then the direction (zu'a).  That
>seems like a very complicated system.

Imaginary journeys need vectors which distances+directions.  Start "at"
the school (a tensed sumti can override the space-time reference
locally.  Then shift "left" 30 meters - a distance and direction i.e.
vector.  Additional offsets can be stated as successive
directions+distances.

In actuality the tense structure "offsets" is supposed to be as vague
as the base location, hence zu'ava.

>> But then
>> leaving the first tagged sumti off "zu'a(vi/va?) lo mitre be li cino"
>> would imply an offset from the space-time origin, whereas the standard
>> interpretation would be that it is to the left of some unspecificied 30
>> meter length.
>
>And not only that, but some unspecified length to the left of that
>unspecified 30 meter length. Perhaps another 30 m.

This sounds like the mirror image of the argument that "vi le mitre be
li cino" might mean "at the thing which is 30 meters long".

>> In the dual-tense, the apparent opacity of "lo" is fine
>> and I think more comfortably non-subjective, whereas in the second case
>> you lose the implication that the event is taking place the the left of
>> a specific 30 meter interval, i.e. the one extending 30 meters to the
>> left of the space-time-origin (which defaults in lieu of the explicitly
>> stated school).
>
>I'm completely lost in that paragraph.

Let's try again.

In
le verba cu kelci vi le ckule zu'a lo mitre be li cino
The children are playing (imaginary journey: at the school, then left by/of
      some 30 meter measure)

"lo" works here because context pins down the indefinite

If we don't specify a starting point, one would think that we start from
the space-time reference.  But I believe we have usage history that
FAhA-tagged sumti alone are not *necessarily* an offset at which point
the indefiniteness of "lo" = "dapoi" starts to be a problem.

le verba cu kelci zu'a lo mitre be li cino
The children play to-the-left of some 30 meter measure.

because there is less context to restricts the "lo mitre" from "da poi
mitre"

The second sentence would work with "le mitre", forcing specificity, by
using "le mitre" in the first sentence when specificity is provided by
context, would seem to me to emphasize the non-veridicality of the
description.

Does this make more sense.

Of course the usage history of FAhA tags is much less solid than that of
VI/ZA which already took a blow when we made them exlusively magnitudes.
But we have the grammar to point us on how these things are intended to
be used.  No one will ever use a complete tense that uses all the
grammatical features (except possibly to provoke a riot zo'o), but
thinking in terms of such an example helps us understand how the pieces
stand on their own when the others are ellipsized.

BTW, in the questions about zi'o and friends, as well as fa'a/to'o I
believe that something may be being lost here, but don't have time to
check the reference.

zi'o/zo'i seem to relate solely to the origin
fa'a/to'o seem like the same thing, but refer to a point possibly other than
          the origin

If you have 2 points, an origin O and a second point P, such as:

             O                                P

Then "towards point", seem like it would be between O and P
And "away from point" seems like it would be to the left of O in the above
diagram.

zo'i and ze'o (approaching/receding) don't seem to have much meaning in
a non-motion context - both suggest a radial line.

But the cmavo list, which I think was taken from Imaginary journeys,
seems to have these backwards.

zo'i in a non-motion sense seems to mean "nearer than", and "ze'o"
"beyond" which pretty much seem to require a second point to be
meaningful.  In which case zo'i is somewhere between O and P, and ze'o
is somewhere to the right of P. But fa'a and to'o in the non-motion
sense are not glossed to invoke the other point and hence read like they
are equivalently radial lines from O.

Since all are defined primarily for motion, we COULD arbitrarily retify
these meanings to cover all possibilities assuming that the FAhA is used
to tag a point P.

This would seem to me to give:
to'o  left of O
fa'a  between O and P
zo'i  either non-specific radial of O, of P, or same as fa'a
ze'o  either non-specific radial of O, of P, or right of P

On the other hand, only fa'a and to'o need necessarily invoke a P in
order to have distinct meaning (fa'aku = zo'i to'oku = ze'o in motion
and hence presumably in location usage).

I'll let others decide what they want the stationary forms to mean, as
long as they are consistent with the motion meanings, whether they match
what I just described.

lojbab