From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:56:42 2010 Reply-To: ia@stryx.demon.co.uk Sender: Lojban list Date: Tue Jan 28 09:30:08 1997 From: Iain Alexander Subject: Re: A question about space tenses X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-UIDL: f47c4c717f6a9ff2a43498070daf4b00 X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1590 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Jan 28 09:30:08 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - Message-ID: In message <854331650.106093.0@vms.dc.lsoft.com> jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR writes: > It would be unfortunate that fa'a couldn't be used for orientation, as > there is no other cmavo for that function. For example, how would > we say: > la djan zu'afa'a se flira > John left-towards is faced. > John is facing left. > > or: > la djan se flira fa'a le tricu > John faces (towards) the tree. la djan. se farna le zunle la djan. selfirfa'a le tricu > If the plane is flying east, and the girl is running > towards the back of the plane, then the girl is running west, but the > event of running is moving east (as seen from the ground). The cmavo > mo'i can only refer to this latter motion of the event, not the motion > of the girl, if we are going to be consistent with the rest of the > tenses. You could always say e.g. mi ne mo'i ca'uvu citka le mi sanmi if you want to talk about the position or movement of an individual sumti. > Many events require a direction to be specified. Events involving > movement of one of their sumti are a special case of that, perhaps > the most common, but there are others that still have an orientation > without movement. What is needed is some way to show the orientation, > not the movement. Perhaps, but it looks like we're stuck with using the gismu {farna} for that. -- Iain Alexander ia@stryx.demon.co.uk I.Alexander@bra0125.wins.icl.co.uk -- Iain Alexander ia@stryx.demon.co.uk I.Alexander@bra0125.wins.icl.co.uk