[lojban-beginners] Re: Tenses in abstractions

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

The "pu" is a bit redundant, since "last night" already shows that it
was in the past.

I would say:

   ti'u ma do co'a sipna ca lo prulamcte
   "At what time did you fall asleep last night?"

> 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?

Yes.

> 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.

Officially, {pu co'a} is a single compound tag, while {co'a pu} is two
tags, equivalent to {co'a ku pu}, so their grammar is subtly
different. There is a proposal to simplify the compounding of tags, so
that basically any order would be allowed in tag compounds:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Internal+grammar+of+tags

As for the meaning, tense and aspect are pretty much orthogonal in
this case, so the order doesn't seem to make much difference. I think
that there could be a subtle difference if instead of a state like
"sipna" you had an accomplishment, say "kargau lo vorme". Then I would
say that {pu co'a kargau} says that the start happened in the past
(but maybe the opening is still going on), while {co'a pu kargau} says
that the opening happened in the past, and co'a indicates the start of
the past opening. Probably a distinction more subtle than ever needed.

> 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}?

{lo nu do pu co'a sipna} descibes a start of sleeping that happened
before something. It doesn't say before what exactly, but the usual
reference is the time of the utterance. Since you are already saying
by other means that this starting event took place last night, the
"pu" doesn't really add much.

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

Don't worry about that, keep it coming.

mu'o mi'e xorxes