From - Tue Feb 20 14:55:53 1996 Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id CAA07169 for ; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 02:39:25 -0500 Message-Id: <199602140739.CAA07169@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 77B22B10 ; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 2:06:08 -0500 Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 07:58:56 +0100 Reply-To: Goran Topic Sender: Lojban list From: Goran Topic Subject: Re: GEN: almost-PROPOSAL: intervals To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 4611 > >Something in that line almost works, though: > > > >... co'a le puzi nanca belipimu > > That was my intent - at the inception of the previous adjacent 6 month period. > > >But I find it clumsy. Less so than using temci, but also less precise. > > Not sure why it seems less precise. Inchoative is a point event. and we > are define the point by means of the interval. co'a is precise. zi isn't. So, lo puzi mentu can be just the previous minute, or it can mean the minute five minutes ago. However, after thinking for a while, this actually works (I think); it's precisely, but even more clumsy: co'a le caze'apu nanca belipimu > Clumsy - well that is an > aesthetic consideration and one you may be better able to make than I. > Especially since you are a native speaker of a language with perfectives. It's arcane. ZA/xe'i/ZA+NOI/ZA+GOI is equally important concept in imaginary journeys stuff as PU and ZEhA and ROI and spatial equivalents FAhA, VEhA and fe'e+ROI. All of them are really trivial. You se {ba da}, you know what it means. Even when you see {be'adu'amo'i fe'eciroi} a rather complex tense, you know perfectly well where the thing happens. You see {co'a le caze'apu bu'a}, equivalent in complexity to {pu da}, and you know nothing unless you a) think about what this means for 15 seconds minimum, or b) you know it as a *phrase*. Secondly, if you use it as a phrase (I don't think myself capable to use something like this naturally, off-the-cuff), you need to know *two* different ones just for the temporal meaning: {co'a le caze'apu bu'a} and {co'u le caze'aba bu'a}, since you *have* to express the direction of the distance together with the distance itself. This gets even more complicated in spatial tenses: {fe'eco'u le bu'uve'abe'a bu'a}. Imagine saying "It's three metres to the right" as {ko'a zvati fe'eco'u le bu'uve'ari'u mitre be li ci}. I just can't. I don't think I will ever be fluent enough to fire off a ma'orpoi like that. I have trouble memorising spatial tenses, and you want me to say two every time I want to specify a *distance*? What if you just want to say the distance, without mentioning the direction? Like, I am talking with bu'uki switched on, and I want to say "It is 10 m from here". I'd say "ko'a zvati [fe'e]xe'i lo mitre be li pano" (I still don't know if fe'e is necessary, but no other tense works both spatially and temporally, so I'm putting it in just in case). xorxes would use {va lo mitre...}, under vei,on's non-proposal it would come out as {vanoi mitre...}. I don't know how to say this using cessative and intervals, since I don't know how to specify an interval that starts at a specified point without specifying endpoint. {ve'abu'u} I presume wouldn't work - if it parallels {ze'aca} then it means interval that includes here (bu'u) as any one of its points. Right? The only thing I can think of is to work around this, and specify ve'ize'o, but that is not quite what I want to say. You see now what I mean by clumsy? It is an important tense feature if one bothers to speak in tenses at all, and it should be expressible with constructs of similar level of complexity, or maybe just a little higher (like vei,on's non-proposal, which is a bit more complex pe'i, although shorter and elegant). > BTW>> ca'o le puzi nanca belipimu > > > >during the close-past .5-year > > should mean under perfective languages that I went throughout the close-past > .5 year, and hence that I was in Glasgow for the last 6 months, not for a > short period within that 6 months. Right. That's what I mean. > At least from my Russian understandings > the use of a perfective when describing two events means that they coexist in > time, and I have read at least the strong implication that one even is not > substantially different in time spread than the other. Is this true for > Croatian? I am sorry, I can't make this out. If you are really interested, give me an example in English and Russian and tag parts of speech in the latter, and I'll try to tell you what it would look like in Croatian. I don't understand what you mean by "use of perfectives when describing two events". I can't think of a way to describe two events at once, except by putting one into participle form. The other way is using connectives. The connective and the tense I use would implicate when things happen in relation to each other. This sounds confusing. That's 'cause I'm confused. Send me a couple of examples, I'll try to figure them out, OK? co'o mi'e. goran.