[lojban-beginners] Re: zvati

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 12:30:21PM -0400, Betsemes wrote:
> > There is no disagreement about that: bu'u is solely about space.
> > Period.
>
> Do you agree on this?:
>
> >I consider it purely locational too, it's just that I don't
> >accept that something that is not there can serve to indicate a
> >location. {bu'u le karce} means "at the location of the car", not
> >"at any location the car ever was or will be". {bu'u lo nu pu
> >salci} indicates the location where a party was held in the past,
> >not a location where, for example, at some point in the future, a
> >party will have been held in the past.

Who wrote that, by the way?

That's a semantic issue, and is entirely dependant upon context.
Technically, if you don't specify a tense or aspect in a sentence,
the speaker could me "ba ka'e nai", which means something like
"never will happen".  But that would make the speaker rather
hostile, so we tend to assume that people mostly mean something like
"ca ca'a" when they have not otherwise specified.

All of the interpretations of the fragments above are perfectly
acceptable *in certain contexts*.

For example:

    ba lo karce snuti le karce cu muvdu le karce zalvi stuzi .i lo
    pulji cu sisku lo datni bu'u le karce

which is intended to mean:

    After the car accident, the car was moved to the car crushing
    place (i.e. dump).  The police search for clues at the place the
    car was.

> Until now, I have considered Lojban a language where the
> definitions are literal. So if you state that something is
> locational only, then I will assume that time has nothing to do
> with it. 

Agreed.

> But if you say that the involved things have to be simultaneously
> at the same place, then it has also to do with time. 

Agreed.

> If we need to consider that bu'u *must* have to accept an argument
> which is simultaneously present with whatever the sentence is
> about, 

I do not believe that we do; it depends on context.

> Now I have to ask you in which point you disagreed with Jorge
> about zvati and what updates must be done. 

I disagreed that zvati was purely locational, because of the way the
English was written.  I have been convinced that the intention was
locational, and have updated jbovlaste to reflect this.

-Robin

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