[lojban-beginners] Re: plipe

["Brett Williams" <mungojelly@gmail.com>]

On 5/21/08, A. PIEKARSKI <totus@rogers.com> wrote:
> coi rodo
>  I've been reviewing some lojban vocabulary, and have come to {plipe}.
>  x4 is defined as the height leapt.  But most of the time, when we
>  'leap', it's not to attain height but to cross a distance e.g. across
>  a crevice.  How would we say 'I leapt one meter across the crevice'?
>  The height achieved in doing so would be of little interest
>  to most people.
>  mu'o mi'e andrus

There are few (no?) places in the gismu structures which refer specifically to a distance travelled.  I agree with Xorxes that it's idiomatic to express most such concepts with the space-tense tag "ve'a".  Consider that to a Lojbanic mind, space and time are similar constructs.  An event of plipe travels over a certain distance, during a certain length of time, as do all physical activities, and they all have the tense system basically available to express qualities of that motion through space-time. 
 
The most lobykai role of gismu place structures is to show us what the soul of a gismu is.  The gismu "plipe" is no different from other motion words in terms of having distance, but its quality of reaching a certain height (by travelling up to it, before falling back down) is characteristic.
 
The distance travelled is an emergent property, if you think about it, of the second and third places and their properties, and in practice that's one way that occured to me to express the sentiment you asked for:
 
mi pu plipe lo bancu be lo drata korbi be lo condi fenra be ve'a lo mitre

I jumped to beyond the other side of a deep  crevice which was a meter large.
  
That puts the space-tense into the size of the hole, as opposed to the leaping, which is more appropriate if the crevice is in fact a meter wide itself, as to attempt to jump a one-meter crevice by jumping exactly one meter would be foolhardy. 
 
Incidentally, if you're not being precise or talking about gismu place structures or something, but rather telling a story for example, then I think one fun expressive way to say things like this is in big tanru: 
 
.ii mi mitre fenra snada bo plipe
Eek!  I meter-crevice successfully-leap! 
 
mu'o mi'e la .bret. no'u la selckiku