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To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
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Organization: Institute for Commercial Engineering
From: "Cyril Slobin" <slobin@feast.fe.msk.ru>
Date: Tue,  3 Oct 1995 17:37:18 +0300
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Subject: Re: tense conversions
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coi

> > Are you saying that {ca pu'o} means the same as {ba co'a}? I don't agree.
> That doesn't follow.  As I said the other day, {ba co'a} entails nothing
> about the present; the event might already be in progress.  {ca pu'o} excludes
> that possibility.

{ba co'a} claims that start of the event is in the future. How can event
be in progress in the present if it's start is still in the future? 

> Consider the world line of the ball.  There either <is> or <isn't> a ball-
> falling-event somewhere along that world line.  If there <is> one, then
> it is the case that for some t1, at time t1 we <are> in the "pu'o" portion
> of that event.  If no such event <exists>, then there can be no such time
> t1, and in particular, the claim that t1 = the present is necessarily false.

Exellent! Really I was trying to express the same thing.

> But someone making such a claim is not lying, because claims about the
> future are not lies.  This is a fact about claims, not about the future.
> To lie is to say what you know is not true, and since you don't know the
> future (even though the world-line model presumes that the future is
> knowable), any claim with "ba" or "pu'o" cannot be a lie unless it
> claims something that you now know to be impossible.

It's about 'lying', not about tenses. In discussion above we (I, at
least) use formal logic meaning of 'lie' - 'to express something that is
not true', independent of knowledge, intentions etc..

co'o mi'e kir.

-- 
Cyril Slobin <slobin@fe.msk.ru> `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said,
<http://www.fe.msk.ru/~slobin/> `it means just what I choose it to mean'