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Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:58:10 -0500
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Subject: [lojban-beginners] Tenses in abstractions
From: Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
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I tried translating "When did you go to sleep last night?" I know
about {sumti tcita} for this (ti'u), but I'm not sure if you can use
them to fill 3 of tcika's places instead of just 2, so I did:
ma lenu do pu co'a sipna cu tcika le prulamcte (be le cabdei)

I have four questions:
1. Just in general, is that structured other-than-terribly?
2. If I just say {le prulamcte}, will {be le cabdei} (which I put in
parentheses for this reason) be implied in general? Certainly it's
ambiguous without it, but is it a relatively fair assumption that
"last night" is what is meant?
3. I learned recently that, for example, {na'e ba <selbri>} doesn't
mean "will other than <selbri>" but "other than will <selbri>" (might
be in the present or past, in other words). So then what is the
distinction between {pu co'a} and {co'a pu}? It seems like the second
one would be "in the past kind of begin" and the second would be
"begin kind of in the past", which seem like they should be different,
though I can't see how. The CLL seems a little vague on this, though
it does touch on it.
4. As in the title, how does time work in abstractions which are
assigned tenses outside the abstraction? Here the event is assigned a
time in the past by the x3 place of {tcika}; so what happens to the
{pu}? Is it now before the assigned time of the abstraction (meaning
that in this case the {pu} is not what is wanted)? Is it relative to
the main {bridi}?

Sorry this got kinda long; and also sorry if it seems like I'm kinda
flooding this list of late.

mu'omi'e latros.