Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Duration questions

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   But as I demonstrated that whole
> "relative to....somthing explicitly mentioned in the bridi itself"
> DOES/CAN take the time period to a completely new reference point.

I thought that was MY point. "pu" always places the event relative to
some reference point, be it explicit or implicit.

> "pu" can mean "before a a billion years in the future from now",
> "before Columbus sailed to North America" or "before I sit down to
> eat".  It no longer just means "before".  It means "before X" ....

Indeed.

Except I don't understand what you mean by "no longer just means
'before'". A stand alone "before" is equivalent to "before now" or
"before then", it's just one more instance of "before X".

>  No, I'm shifting the meaning from "a going that last long as goings
> go" to "a going that lasts long as ko'a goes" analagously  paralleling
> the way "pu klama" shifts to "pu ko'a"

I don't think so. You don't use "jmive ze'u lo dunra" to mean "a life
that lasted long as winters go", do you?

> Long for "le dunra", "the
> particular winter", is isomorphic with "the 66th-99th percentiles of
> all winter length samples drawn from a population of exactly one
> particular winter".  (Which of course, you will say, from a statistics
> point  of view is exactly the same as the length of that winter.
> Because the the "bell curve" here is a single point, one winters
> length, so the percentile you are looking at (ze'i, ze'a, or ze'u) is
> all the same.  But I'm assuming that there is another unspoken of
> winter that has 0 length, so now my population draws in the upper
> third (ze'u) will in fact average  66%-99% of the particular winter)

Was that another April Fool's joke? :)

If you want to use "ze'u ko'a" to mean "for a large fraction of ko'a",
you are of course free to do so, but I really, really don't see how
you can claim that this is just another instance of the usual pattern
of selbri tcita to sumti tcita relationship. In the usual pattern,
"<tag> broda" can always be expressed as "broda <tag> ko'a" by
choosing a suitable "ko'a". The tag always has the same effect on
broda, and ko'a only adds more information.

>>> (The same is true of all spatial
>>> tenses, too, of course.  I can be in this room, next to my computer on
>>> my chair far-away chatting to you.  The first three would be tcita
>>> sumti, and the last would be a selbri tcita.)
>>
>> I would say the last one should be a seltau, not a tcita at all, since
>> "far away chatting" is a type of chatting, not the distance of the
>> event of you and I chatting being far away from some reference point.
>
>  Fair enough.  Actually, I would think of it as a tag on you
> (although we'd unfortunately have to momentarily and uglily selbriize
> you, because we have no other convenient way to tensify KOhA--  "lo vu
> me do")  But I hope you got my point despite the clumsiness of my
> chosen example.

Not sure what the point was here. If it was that FAhA works just like
PU, obviously I agree. If you were trying to establish a parallelism
between FAhA and your use of ZEhA, I don't see it.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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