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Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:27:09 +0000
From: "Karl Naylor" <karl.org@gmail.com>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Debug my propaganda?
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On 19/03/07, Turniansky, Michael <MICHAEL.A.TURNIANSKY@saic.com> wrote:

>   So you are implying that you can never say (or write) "lo bratu ca
> carvi" (It's snowing) because at some point in time or space that
> statement is not true?  Nonsense...

Not at all.  I'm not sure how you inferred that from what I said.  If
anything, I think I was saying the opposite: that "lo bratu cu carvi"
is always true, because this has happened many times, is probably
happening somewhere right now and probably will happen again, and I
could be referring to any of those times/places.

By a similar token, I figure that (still assuming that my studying
eventually lasts 6 months) "lonu mi tadni cu masti li xa" is always
true, no matter when you say it.  And this was the reason for me
thinking that "lonu mi tadni cu jeftu li pavo" would be false; because
the event actually lasts six months, independent of what time the
statement is made.  However, I've now changed my mind because I
believe that there's an elided interval {ze'epu} in that statement,
which does take account of the speaker's temporal location.

> > lenu mi ze'epu tadni la lojban. jeftu li pavo
> (You are missing a "cu" (or other sumti/selbri separator) before the
> jeftu, but otherwise, yes)

Hmm, thought I'd be OK without any separator here because {tadni} has
already appeared and swallowed up {la lojban.}; therefore {jeftu}
cannot be the selbri of {la lojban.}, so it must be the selbri of
{lenu}.  Or is this ambiguous because {la lojban.} could be the x2 of
{jeftu}?

> > actually, I guess I could just elide the {ze'epu}, as long as I don't
> > specify any other interval.

>   Yes, that's the point.  It might at the very base be ambiguous if you
> want to split hairs fine enough, but context lets us understand what is
> meant (I guess that means I'm in the naturalist camp of lojban)

I am actually fine with the ambiguity arising from elided information
(in this case, the elided {ze'epu}).  My problem was that I'd
forgotten about interval tenses, and thus I was interpreting the
statement in a way that is not ambiguous, but false -- as if the
interval was necessarily {ze'eca}.

I'll happily tolerate ambiguity in my speech, but not falsehoods if I
can help it.