Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 01:08:15 -0500
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab>
Message-Id: <199501230608.AA24630@access1.digex.net>
To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
Subject: to'o
Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net
Status: RO

>To me, if {lei verba cu kelci to'o le ckule} implies that the playing
>faces away from the school, then {lei verba cu kelci zu'a le ckule}
>implies that it faces left of the school.  I thought that the FAhAs show
>the position of the event relative to the origin, and not where the
>event faces.

Yes.  But some words were chosen more for their motion applications,
including fa'a and to'o in particular.  You have to stretch to find ANY
meaning for them in a non-motion sense.

Any definition of to'o as a location must correspond to one for fa'a,
its opposite. to'o exists ONLY because the change of -nai negation in
tense compounds to be strictly contradictory and not scalar, made
"fa'anai" no longer viable.

But now thinking back to how fa'a got into the language in the first
place, I recall that we were replacing an earlier system, which in turn
was replacing one of JCB's adhoc-eries, which included tenses like
"along a path".  "zo'i and zeho and others labelled in the cmavo list as
FAhA4 are similarly derived from this basis).  Since fa'a and to'o both
define radial lines with respect to the reference point (in this case
"le ckule"), it seems that both would be used for a location that is a
generally radial path.  Then the choice between to'o and fa'a is
determined pretty straightforwardly only if there is some kind of
inherent orientation to the path.

So I retract that it necessarily means that you are facing away from the
school.  Rather, it means that you are confined to a radial path which
may or may not have some occult directionality to it, depending on
whether context suggests it.

As to the underlying issue, I would consider it a substantive change to
make VA/ZA have anything to do with precise distance.  The Lojban tense
system is intentionally (or is that intensionally zo'o) imprecise.  It
would also implicitky require us to make the interval size words require
a precise size in my mind..

On the other hand, in my 2 minute glance at the grammar, I note that the
constructs space-offset and time-offset seem to be intended to allow
successive shifts of some (ZI/VA) distance in some direction.  

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.  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.  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 still like the old, vague "lo" that could be +specific +veridical when
it mattered.  %^)

lojbab