Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Duration questions

[tijlan <jbotijlan@googlemail.com>]

On 10 March 2010 23:32, komfo,amonan <komfoamonan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Why would {ze'a lo cabdei} not mean "a time interval which is medium
relative to the length of today", referring to about 12 hours, instead
of "with today (24 hours) as the whole interval, the length of which I
consider medium/unspecified"? Then we could just use {ze'e} in asking
"To what does the whole interval of your having been living in this
house amount?" If the answer is {lo cabdei}, the modal remains to be
{ze'e} independent of the speakers' measurement.


mu'o mi'e tijlan