From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:50:29 2010 Reply-To: Chris Bogart Sender: Lojban list Date: Mon Mar 10 10:18:18 1997 From: Chris Bogart Organization: Quetzal Subject: Re: modals tagging selbri question... X-To: lojban%cuvmb.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 971 X-From-Space-Date: Mon Mar 10 10:18:18 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - Message-ID: Trevor wrote: > But it seems to be implied in the explanations of modals that i can say > .i mi ka'e citka vau > and have it mean "I can eat." -- this doesn't seem right to me. This > seems to express "I (able)ly eat." I think you're generalizing incorrectly from tanru to modals. With tanru, the first one modifies the second one in the way you describe -- for example "mi kakne citka vau" would mean "I ablely eat". But with modals it works almost the other way around; you can think of the selbri as modifying *them*, in a way. "mi ka'e citka" describes a capability; "mi pu'o citka" describes something that is fixin' to happen (which might not actually come to pass); "mi na'e citka" describes something other than eating. I think the modals are all pretty consistent this way: "mi citka" is not necessarily a kind of eating. -- ____ Chris Bogart \ / http://www.quetzal.com Boulder, CO \/ cbogart@quetzal.com