Re: [lojban-beginners] Why is CAhA a tense/modal?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 10:22 AM, MorphemeAddict <lytlesw@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage
>>
>> I also don't think they're very well chosen, as a lot of them are easy to
>> define without circularity.
>
> Really? Which ones? How would you define them?

The ones I always found a bit surprizing were the pairs GOOD - BAD,
BIG - SMALL, A LONG TIME - A SHORT TIME, NEAR - FAR, when one in each
pair could easily be defined in terms of the other: OPPOSITE-OF GOOD,
OPPOSITE-OF BIG, OPPOSITE-OF A-LONG-TIME, OPPOSITE-OF NEAR.

They don't have OPPOSITE-OF as a primitive, but presumably it must be
definable in terms of primitives (although it's not easy to see how).
And even if you needed to use BAD, SMALL, A SHORT TIME and FAR to
define OPPOSIT-OF, it would still be more economical to have
OPPOSITE-OF as the primitive instead of the other four.

Also, couldn't A-SHORT-TIME and A-LONG-TIME not be just SMALL
FOR-SOME-TIME and BIG FOR-SOME-TIME?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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