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Re: [lojban-beginners] Mixing tenses





On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 9:51:30 PM UTC+4, Ian Johnson wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Jorge Llambías <jjlla...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Ian Johnson <blindb...@gmail.com> wrote:
While this parses, it's...philosophically subtle at best. I think of {mi} and {do} as being temporally nonlocal, which means you can't restrict their referent by specifying a time, since they "exist in many times in the first place. I think if you want to specify a time it should be the time of an event, which is why I suggested the version that I did above. Similar issues ensue with the {me} version.

As you say, that's more a philosophical issue than a linguistic one. Presumably you would have the same type of objections to English expresions like "my old self", "the new me",  "you as a teenager", and so on.

mu'o mi'e xorxes
True, but this "as" issue is a broader one, as has already been noted on the mriste at least once. If it is to have a solution (which it doesn't), it should be a general solution, not ad hoc solutions that work in this context but not that one. Alternately we could have a different way entirely to look at it, which I think is the more natural approach, but that's another discussion. To make my point that this is ad hoc, can you translate "It is bad to eat rice as one's primary source of nutrition" with {pe}? I also think that solutions like {mi pe pu ku} are strongly informed by European languages.

{lo pu me mi ku}, no? Again the same issue?

Are there examples of non-European languages with similar constructs?

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

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