Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Duration questions

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 7:24 PM, tijlan <jbotijlan@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>  Take heart.  That's exactly how I use ze'a and its kin.  Although I
> have no idea why your message took so long to get in my inbox...

I also got this post only when Robin moved the list. I was going to
respond but then I forgot. Three reasons:

Reason one: parallelism with zi/za/zu. If you accept that ZI tags the
full time displacement magnitude, it is only natural for ZEhA to tag
the full duration magnitude. Similarly for VA and VEhA. There is no
"total displacement" equivalent to ze'e/ve'e in ZI/VA. (This reason
does not apply to those who don't use ZI/VA to tag displacement
magnitudes.)

Reason two: consistency with the rest of the tags. "ze'u broda" says
that broda takes a long time. "broda ze'u ko'a" should say the same
thing, with more precision as to what a "long time" is, it should not
shift to meaning that broda takes the best part of some interval,
perhaps not a long time at all if the interval in question happens to
be a short interval.

Reason three: it is easy to get the fractional meaning by other means:
"ze'a pi so'u ko'a", "ze'a pi so'i ko'a", "ze'a pi so'a ko'a", etc.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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