On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
Do duration questions force you to make an assumption about the relative length of the duration? That is, as I understand it a typical duration question might be:
.i ti zdani do ze'a ma
roughly "how long have you been living in this house?", with the expectation that the duration to come is moderate in length. (Not sure if I should have another tense in there like {ca'o}, but that's another question.) And yet, it seems like if the answer were, say, {lo cabdei} (imagining the person just moved in today), that the corresponding sentence would be:
.i ti zdani mi ze'i lo cabdei
since living in a house for a day is a pretty short time, as time spent living in houses goes. Is there any way around this implicit assumption, short of asking a slightly different question like "when did you move into this house?"?
I take {ze'a} (and its kin {za}, {ve'a}, and {va}) to mean not only "medium", but also "unspecified". Others follow this usage as well, even though it's not strictly in accordance with the definition. So, {[.i ti zdani mi ze'a] lo cabdei} is a reasonable answer to the question.
mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan
Â