[lojban] Re: interactions between tenses, other tenses, and NA

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Adam:
> 'na' can be interspersed among tenses, and I thought that this was to
> allow constructions such as 'roroi na' = 'always not', 'ka'e na' = 'is
> capable of not', etc. If NA must move to the front of the prenex, but
> tenses don't, then what is the point of having NA interspersed with
> tenses? Therefore, I think that tenses work the same as NA, with
> everything directly in front of the selbri moving to the left side of
> the prenex in the same order as they were before the selbri, followed
> by sumti and floating tenses in the order they appear in the bridi. So
> I think that the example from chapter 10 is wrong, since it ignores
> the different scope that tenses directly before the selbri have, and
> the example from chapter five is referring to the interaction between
> 'na' and 'pu', where there really is no change in meaning, but with
> tenses like 'roroi', you need to consider the order that the tenses
> and the na appear in.
> 
> Does anyone object to this? Could anyone *really* think that 'roroi na
> broda' means 'not always brodas' (i.e. 'sometimes doesn't broda')? Can
> we get a (quasi-)official pronouncement from Cowan?

I sort of object to this. This is because I already object to the
rule for ku-less na, and in some ways I'd rather let it stand out
as egregiously exceptional, and not compound the problem by making
other tcita follow the same rules.

Instead, I'd suggest always using {na ku} and never plain {na}.
That or just ignore the special na-rule.

--And.