From sentto-44114-3386-962636941-mark=kli.org@returns.onelist.com Mon Jul 03 15:07:52 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: shoulson-kli@meson.org Received: (qmail 10047 invoked from network); 3 Jul 2000 15:07:51 -0000 Received: from zash.lupine.org (205.186.156.18) by pi.meson.org with SMTP; 3 Jul 2000 15:07:51 -0000 Received: (qmail 22218 invoked by uid 40001); 3 Jul 2000 15:09:27 -0000 Delivered-To: kli-mark@kli.org Received: (qmail 22215 invoked from network); 3 Jul 2000 15:09:27 -0000 Received: from mk.egroups.com (207.138.41.165) by zash.lupine.org with SMTP; 3 Jul 2000 15:09:27 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-44114-3386-962636941-mark=kli.org@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.10.38] by mk.egroups.com with NNFMP; 03 Jul 2000 15:09:24 -0000 Received: (qmail 24542 invoked from network); 3 Jul 2000 15:08:51 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 3 Jul 2000 15:08:51 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO argo.bas.bg) (195.96.224.7) by mta1 with SMTP; 3 Jul 2000 15:08:50 -0000 Received: from banmatpc.math.bas.bg (root@banmatpc.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.2]) by argo.bas.bg (8.11.0.Beta1/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-6) with ESMTP id e63F8hO17425 for ; Mon, 3 Jul 2000 18:08:48 +0300 Received: from iad.math.bas.bg (iad.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.88]) by banmatpc.math.bas.bg (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id SAA07379 for ; Mon, 3 Jul 2000 18:08:42 +0300 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Message-ID: <396086D2.66AA31B3@math.bas.bg> X-Mozilla-Draft-Info: internal/draft; vcard=0; receipt=0; uuencode=0; html=0; linewidth=0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en To: lojban@egroups.com References: From: Ivan A Derzhanski MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list lojban@egroups.com; contact lojban-owner@egroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list lojban@egroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 15:28:02 +0300 Subject: Re: [lojban] Englishistic Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Invent Yourself wrote: > > All these intense discussions of the intricacies of Lojban grammar > occur in English. I wonder how different they would be were they > conducted in a different natural language! One might also wonder how many of them would've been initiated in the first place. Yes, a very interesting question. The set of terms of the `still/already' family is generally similar in the main European lgs, but the details differ. Were we speaking German or French, we would be concerned about the rendering of the difference between _noch_ and _noch immer_ (_encore_ and _toujours_, _még_ and __még mindig_ in Hungarian, etc.), among other things. Spanish is very similar to English; but three of the six source lgs have very rudimentary tense systems, and in those it is reasonable to expect that even if there are `still/already' terms, they will differ from the English ones in that they will be used for things that are expressed in English by mere tense distinctions. This is in fact the case in Russian, where _uzhe_ `already' + past tense often does the job of a past perfect tense. But in Arabic `still' is expressed preiphrastically: `he is still sleeping', lit. `he doesn't cease sleeping'; cf. Spanish _sigue durmiendo_ `he continues sleeping' in the same sense. Chinese dictionaries gloss `still' as _hai2_ and `already' as _yi3jing_, but then there are also the sentence-final particles _ne_ and _le_, and adverb and particle can be used together, so the entire picture isn't much like English. And Hindi doesn't have words for `still' or `already' at all; either one can sort of be expressed by `even now', or one says eg `he's finished going' for `he is/has gone already'. --Ivan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ High long distance bills are HISTORY! Join beMANY! http://click.egroups.com/1/4164/4/_/17627/_/962636941/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com