Fwd from pc: [lojban] Origin of potentiality and capabilit...

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx]

>From: Pycyn@aol.com
>Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1999 04:59:52 EST
>
> >I'm interested in
> >knowing whether the modals ka'e, nu'o, pu'i (especially the latter) all
have
> >equivalents in some natural languages, or were coined for Lojban.

>Well, it depends on what you mean by "equivalents" (Sorry, the Philosophers'
>Union requires us to start off all answers that way). I don't know of a
>langauge which has all of them expressed in relatively short, grammatically
>free forms. On the other hand, I don't know of a language which cannot make
>the point fairly economically (no worse than the English ponies given,
>relatively). 
> Indeed, the hard one in natural languages is probably "ca'a" itself, since
>that is generally the default in any sentnece in any other language I can
>think of (relative to context, of course) and so is rarely said explicitly --
>in an unemphatic way, at least (i.e. NOT in response to "You shittin' me,
>man?"). And there is at least one story about Chinese (not the generally
>favored one) that would make even that a part of the language (but, if I
>remember rightly, syntactic rather than lexical).
> I take it that "ka'e" is a pretty clear item in most languages, though it
>may take almost any role: lexical item, construction, compound, .... English
>has the generic sentence as the simplest version (example 19.1, though
>unmarked) and the pony itself as a longer one, with other shorter and longer
>constructions available. 
> But I do not know of a language (including the relevant sorts of formal
>logics) that has a systematic approach to the issue of whether the potential
>has been actualized, the issue between "nu'o" and "pu'i." English -- and I
>assume other languages in the same vein -- can make do with modals in
>contrary-to-fact constructions (or maybe different but related modals): "He
>could ..." in the proper context carries the force of "nu'o." But there
is no
>corresponding mode for "pu'i" (that I can think of) other than riding the
>pony. Logically, this may be because the actual doing entails the potential,
>which then need not be specified explicitly. Unless the question is whether
>the potential continues after the actualization, in which case ordinary
>languages would probably take the whole as two separate questions ("did
(hence
>could) then and still can now"). 
> My (non-veridical) memory is that the Lojban forms arose in response to a
>particular problem raised by a Lojbanist; many of these problems have been
too
>weird to have standard natural langauge equivalents (though they are not the
>less significant for all that).
>pc