Re: A modest proposal re: tenses

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

Goran, last week, wrote:
>The position of an event can be obtained with jai, if I read the
>intention OK.  The place I thought at is lo jai bu'u mi pensi.  If
>that's what you meant by position abstract.

That isn't grammatical, and since you gave no translation, I am not sure
what was intended. lomi jaibu'u pensi does work. jaibu'u has the grammar
of SE in a description, and so what you had was grammatically something
like *le se mi pensi.

ni'o
>> {ki'e ku'i ju'ocu'i} I was referring to the principle that all typographic
>> distinctions (chapter headings, for example) should be reflected in the
>> phonetics.  I think this is a somewhat silly principle, anyway (for
>> instance, while it's noble to try to make mathematical expressions
>> speakable, it's totally infeasible for expressions of any complexity.  I
>> saw a Ph.D. thesis on speaking equations for the blind recently; see
>> http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/aster/demo.html)
>
>It's not that silly. It *looks* silly because you're not used to it.
>What I'm saying is that the story looks quite unambiguous and concise
>even without the paragraph boundaries. Yes, empty lines don't count in
>lojban, there was no confusion arising because of the lack of ni'o, so
>no harm done.

I am not sure I agree with Goran here.  When someone reads an English
text to you, they do not speak the paragraph marks, and you still
understand the text.  If the information of it being a new paragraph is
important, the speaker generally gives a sign of this is tone of voice.
Lojban conveys what is in tone of voice in English through words, so
that the printed text and the spoken text convey the same information.
So a ni'o/no'i means more than a reseting of variables.  It has the
discursive effect of indicating a change in topic.  You can omit ni'o
and no'i when the visual paragraphing is for aid in reading but there is
no topic change.  If you are concerned about resetting variables
unintentionally, you can flag intent for long scoped variables with a
ni'oni'o (perhaps then listing/defining variables of long scope) and
these will not be reset by a simple ni'o.

Typographical conventions that convey no semantics are fine in Lojban,
if they make the result easier to read.  "le mi" vs.  "lemi" does not
change the meaning in the slightest, so writing the two words as one for
ease of reading is OK.  Colin Fine last year (?) did an experiment where
he omitted all spaces not explicitly required by the phonology to
separate words e.g.  "mitavla dolelojbo gerna".  Technically, if you
read this text aloud with penultimate stress, it would be perfectly
understandable, but it is more than a bit hard on the eyes.  Some
aspects of written convention, like paragraph indentation, starting new
sentences with extra spaces (or as some do with Lojban - a new line for
every sentence), double spacing text to avoid eyestrain - have no
semantic import at all, but are merely aids for the visual reading
process.  Hence they are essentially unregulated by Lojban rules.  I do
have typographical conventions for Ju'i Lobypli and other publications I
put out, but that more for my convenience (I have to read the stuff over
and over, and to type/edit it) and for consistency in our teaching
materials.

lojbab