Re: question

[Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>]

Spigot wrote:

> i'm trying to understand CAhA, its tricky. the book sayson pg 243
> that "lojban bridi without tense markers may not necessarily refer
> to actual events: they may also refer to capabilities or potential
> events."

Yeah, that page confused the hell out of me too!

> if this is true, then a huge number of bridi that are said to be
> "obviously" false are not, like
> lo nanmu cu ninmu
> or
> lo'e glipre cu xabju le fi'ortu'a
>
> aren't these bridi true because men are in fact capable of being women,
> (they could prehaps get an operation), and the english are capable of
> typically living in Africa (perhaps they all move there).
>
> it seems that unless you specifically use <ca'a>, then your bridi
> is true in some sense... is this right?

I'd agree in theory, since {lo nanmu cu ninmu} _could_ be equivalent to {lo
nanmu ba ninmu} i.e. some man will in the future be a woman. The only bridi
which would definitely be false (irrespective of falsification by
observation) would be those which are contradictory irrespective of time and
place e.g.

li mu nu'a su'i li re li re

Even something like

lo barda cu cmalu

could be true if we're talking about a big thing that was or will be small,
or if it means something like

lo barda be fi lo manti cu cmalu fi lo xanto

However, in practice, tenseless selbri would default to "whatever time we're
talking about", so unless we knew from context that we were talking about a
past or future sex-change operation, {lo nanmu cu ninmu} would be as false
as {lo nanmu ca'a ninmu}.

Incidentally, some deities are hermaphrodite not in the sense of being
halfway between male and female, but in the sense of possessing both male
and female forms simultaneously. In such a case {lo nanmu ca'a ninmu} could
be true!

co'o mi'e robin.