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From: Cortesi <dcortesi@mindspring.com>
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: staying aloft
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2006 09:46:53 -0800
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
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On Dec 30, 2006, at 2:21 AM, la xorxes wrote:

>> How long can/will we stay aloft?
>
> {ze'a ma} means "for how long?", so:
>    ze'a ma ma'a vofli

ga'inai, but my innocent reading of the cmavo list did
not lead me to think so:

   ze'a      ZEhA     medium time interval
   ze'aba    ZEhA*    for a while after
   ze'aca    ZEhA*    for a while during
   ze'apu    ZEhA*    for a while before

This novice supposed {ze'ama} would mean
"medium time interval when?"
with a response of a tense cmavo.

Except that, I gather, ma always requests a sumti,
not a tense, in response. (Per the refgram, cu'e is
the ask-for-a-tense word. But I didn't want
a response of a tense anyway, I want a response of
a specific length of time.)

If as you say {ze'a ma} is valid, I don't get how
the general idea of fill-in-this-blank questions
works in that case. How would I stick a response
sumti into a tense?

	ze'a ma ma'a vofli
	ze'a pano se mentu ma'a vofli
		[medium-duration 10-minutes we-all fly]

Doesn't that say something like ten-minutes are
flying using propulsion we-all?

In the refgram I read about {roi} and quantified
tenses, but this only seems to extend to number-of-times,
(mi reroi klama == I two-times go) I don't see any
way to get specific about time intervals inside the
context of a tense.

Tho maybe in conversation, cu'e would work:

	ma'a cu'e vofli?
		[we-all what time/space? fly]
	ri mentu pano
		[prior-sumti minutes-duration-is 10]

That is not a grammatical response, which should be a tense,

	ui ze'i
		[not very dam' long!]

But it does answer the question indirectly.

Dave Cortesi

=========

Le mi dzena pa klama La Lojbanistan and all I got was this a'unai tyrcek