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[lojban-beginners] Re: ti/ta/tu, zo'e, da
On 8/17/06, Michael Graff <m.graff@freenet.de> wrote:
Is {ti/ta/tu} just an (indeed practical) abbreviation for {lo vi/va/vu
se jarco be mi} for the sake of brevity and lucidity?
More or less, yes, but not exactly. {lo vu se jarco be mi} could refer to
"what I showed you over there yesterday" for example, it has no
(temporal) tense and it does not necessarily refer to something I'm
showing you right now, like {tu} does. Also {vu} does not really indicate
the place where the shown thing is, but rather the place where the
showing occurs.
Perhaps {tu} could be more precisely expanded as {lo nau se jarco
be mi be'o poi zvati lo darno be mi'o}.
(I ignore the "(property)" that the gi'uste has for of the x2 of {jarco},
I take it to mean just "x1 shows x2 to x3".)
I was surprised to read that {zo'e} seems to be a kind of definite pronoun:
"[zo'e] viska mi" means "'You-know-what' sees me." (see Chapter 16,
Section 2, "Lojban Reference Grammar").
So {mi viska} means the same as {mi viska zo'e zo'e} which means "I see
something, and you know what I see and under which conditions I see."
Right. If I ask {xu do viska le se viska be mi}, you can respond {mi viska}.
"Do you see what I'm seeing?", "I see (it)". That would not normally mean that
you just see anything, but rather that you see the obvious thing being referred
to (what the obvious thing is will depend on the context, of course). In some
context, {zo'e} might turn out to be as vague as {da}.
I have read the passage about {zo'e} because I've been interested in the
difference between {da} and {zo'e}. {da} has the minimal meaning of a
sumti. {da terpa mi} just means "There exists something which terrifies me."
1. Question: Could this source of fear be an illusion, or is {da} used
only for physically existent somethings?
No, there is no default restriction on the values that {da} can take.
2. Question: {da terpa mi} means "Something terrifies me." {[zo'e] terpa
mi} seems to be used interchangebly - in contradiction to the quoted
explanation in the "Lojban Reference Grammer". And why two different
wordes for the same meaning?
{[zo'e] terpa mi} says that whatever is obvious from context terrifies me.
mu'o mi'e xorxes