Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Duration questions

[Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com>]

2010/4/1 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".

  Except that absent any other indicators (storytime or ki) that X is
"now".  Or just plain "before" in English.  That's what I meant by
"just before" -- "I went to the store before".

>
>>  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? :)

  No, I was just trying to explain to you why I think the two
formulations have exactly the same parallelism as pu SELBRI and pu X,
and why I DON'T think that saying "ze'u le dunra" to mean "long, the
winter" = "ze'a le dunra" to mean  "medium, the winter" ="ze'i le
dunra" meaning "short, the winter"  and all meaning EXACTLY the same
amount of time in the sentence "ko'a ZEhA le dunra cu broda" no matter
which is used, when if you remove "le dunra", they are three different
time periods?  That's very unisometric.  Mine correctly preserves the
relationship of a short, medium, and long time periods of the nonsumti
versions.

>
> 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.
>

  It still does.  And with exactly the same "ko'a" as is currently
defined for all PU/ZA/VI, etc.   namely (are you ready?....) "ti".  So
how can "ze'u ti" mean "for a long time of this?" and still mean "for
a long time"?  Because how big/long a space/duration that "ti"
occupies is entirely dependent on context.

>>>> (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.

  My point was that all tenses work the same no matter what subcalss
they are -- tagged as sumti, they make their reference point that
sumti. Without it, they make it "ti", or whatever your other default
might be.

           --gejyspa

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