From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Mon Feb 20 22:08:13 1995
Message-Id: <199502210308.AA26796@nfs2.digex.net>
Date: Mon Feb 20 22:08:13 1995
From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Subject:      Re: ago24 & replies

And:
> ************************************************************************
> * > > I'm not reading your mind properly, but I wonder if your idea    *
> * > > might be something like the Mr Cat stuff brought up by Bob       *
> * > > Chassell last year vis a vis massifiers. The Mr Cat idea is that *
> * > > you do not distinguish one cat from another - all cats count     *
> * > > as the same cat. It turned out that this is not what massifiers  *
> * > > do, but it sounds a bit like what you're saying about {lohe}.    *
> * > Yes, I thought about it too. What would you say to that idea?      *
> *                                                                      *
> * I would support this, for three reasons. First, it is easier to      *
> * define that notions involving archetypes, which seem dependent       *
> * on particular theories of cognition or what have you. Second,        *
> * it provides a way of saying something that Bob Chassell and          *
> * Mark Shoulson have mistakenly (it eventually transpired) thought     *
> * {loi} does. Third, it is a nice idea that cannot be expressed        *
> * by existing devices, whereas you have shown above that our           *
> * present understandings of {lohe}'s meaning can be paraphrased.       *
> ************************************************************************

Agreed then. Anybody against?


> > > If you go in the present then this tersumti could be
> > > filled by {lo cabna}.
> > Again that's the tense {ca}. Are you proposing a new way to deal with
> > tenses?
>
> Yes. Even if this new way doesn't get licensed to appear syntactically,
> if we decree that it's how thinks work implicitly, in the semantics,
> then (a) it would afford a way to define the meaning of {roi} and
> tenses, and (b) it would mean that a seduhu without explicit
> indication of tense may nonetheless correspond to a duhu with specific
> tense.

As long as you don't make the new place a real place, that's how I've
always thought of tenses. In fact, you can make it explicit by sending
the tense from the selbri modifier position to a sumti place as
{<tense>ku}. There's no need to make place structures more complicated
than what they already are.

Jorge