Message-Id: <m0sAYwY-0009acC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Sun, 14 May 1995 04:20:06 -0400
Reply-To:     Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: Questions
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 4764
Lines: 97

>From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
>Subject:      Re: Questions
>
>> >- the box is bottle-shaped, making ta1 both a bottle and a box;
>> >- the box contains one or more bottles;
>> >- the box is made of one or more bottles;
>> >- the box is the contents of one or more bottles;
>> >- the box is the material used for making one or more bottles.
>>
>> The 4th and 5th examples here perplex me; they violate the only
>> meaning I could give to the earlier quote.  Anybody?
>
>The x1 of {botpi tanxu} is a box.  I suppose that the 4th example means
>that it's a box inside a bottle, a "bottled box", although {se botpi
>tanxe} might be more clear.  I don't understand the 5th example either.

For the 4th, I presume the difficulty is the "one or more".  Imagine a
nested series of bottles, with a box in the smallest.  Actually not a
bad description for a matroushka doll, now that I picture it, but I was
deliberately going for weird interpretations.

For the 5th, I can imagine either cutting up a box and reforming it into
a bottle, or simply bottling up something in a container composed of
(perhaps glued together) boxes.

>> I was asking if it's permissible to use {botpi tanxu} for the fourth
>> meaning, or if {se botpi tanxu} is necessary (by the principle that
>> "the first place of {botpi} in some way restricts the relation".
>
>The meanings of tanru are very loose.  The only clear rule is that the
>places are those of the last component.  I would think that the {se} or
>{te} are necessary for clarity, but you probably can't totally exclude
>those meanings without them.

Current thinking tends to require the se/te markers, but the original
principle was that such words can be left out in lujvo or a tanru.  I
think that when no places are being specified for a modifier portion of
a tanru, it should not necessarily be considered "bad".  I believe that
Nick's paper on lujvo place structures uses the presence or absence of
the se/te components to make distinctions in place structure.  I think
that at the moment, Lojban stylistics are leaning to extreme literality.
Literality is thhe direction I would prefer things to lean (as compared,
say, to Michael Helsem's "Purple Lojban" poetry which is extremely
figurative), but perhaps not to the current extent.  Everyday language
use will probably tend to loosen the extremes to which we seem to be
prone right now - it certainly seemed to be the case in our weekly
conversation sessions.

>> >From the "Diagrammed Summary of Lojban Grammar", line 1619:
>> >This construct may be combined with the modal construct discussed just
>> >previously to identify a sumti:
>> >
>> >      la djan. ne pu la mark. [ge'u] [cu] melbi tavla [vau]
>> >      -------- <  >. --------       |     ===========
>> >     John, who was (incidentally) before Mark, is a beautiful-talker.
>>
>> Doesn't this show exactly the confusion about {pu} mentioned earlier?
>> {la mark.} is not an event.
>
>I agree with you. It might mean, I suppose, that John lived before
>Mark was born.

Why is "la mark." not an event?  First of all, it is a named thing, and
it is possible that the speaker is simply labeling some event "Mark"
(which could be a lifetime, or it could be an act of speaking).  If you
grant that you can label an event with a name of course, then the
default assumption is indeed likely that the event named "Mark" happens
to be the lifetime of someone named Mark.

Now I agree that "tu'a la mark." might be more logically explicit, but I
am not sure that it conveys any additional information - you've simply
explicitly said that Mark is a place in some event, and the time
comparison is with the event.  But it says nothing more about what kind
of event (an act of speaking, or a lifetime), so why not just keep
things simple.

>> What's the proper
>> tense indicator for "present, and continuing", without implying any
>> termination?
>
>I would say {caca'o}, to me {ca'o} doesn't imply termination, but others
>will disagree (my views on ZAhOs are a bit unorthodox).

It is correct that ca'o doesn't logically imply termination, if for
example we are dealing with some sort of perpetual state.  But all of
the ZAhO tenses reflect the perfective paradigm, which looks at events
as wholes.  To a considerable extent, perfectives are almost certainly
going to be pragmatically interpreted the way they are in natural
languages, barring contravening context, which includes an implicature
of completion (or at least of entirety to ca'o as a tense).

I would simply say "ca", which means present, and makes no implication
at all about the future.  Implications to stress an expected
continuation/duration could include an interval marker - "caze'u"
meaning that it is continuing over a long "present moment".

lojbab