Re: imperative mood

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

>You mean that {e'u} has both uses of the English expression? I thought
>it meant "I suggest/propose", and not "I suggest/insinuate". I don't
>see why it should mean both just because the same word can be used in
>English for both senses.

May be my cultural bias, of course, but a "suggestion" of a predicate in
the future tense is a "proposal", while in the past tense is an "insinuation".
But Lojban predicates, when unmarked, are nonspecific in time, so either
could be gotten from the same expression.

>> For petition (.e'o), I might say the Lojban for "Please tell me it isn't
>> true!" which emotively has an "e'o" component on the main bridi and an
>> ".a'o" component on the subordinate.  You don't really want the person
>> to tell you it isn't true, if it really is - so it is NOT an imperative.
>
>Whether you mean what you say or not is not the point. {e'o do cusku
>le sedu'u na co'e} is a request to tell that it is not so, independently
>of what you really want to be told. Even in your example "tell me" is
>in the imperative mood.

A request is not necessarily a command, and Lojban imperatives are the latter.
The fact that the English trnaslation is an imperative may mean only that
one has to be creative to avoid an impoerative construction.  I could have
also used "Please!  Are(n't) you going to tell me it isn't true?"  Which
when said in the typically pleading voice is not really a question, but
a petition, and in English doesn't use an imperative construction.  In Lojban,
if the intent is petition, you would NOT want to use "xu" to translate the
plaintive English "question", because the answer "yes, it's true", or "no,
it's not true" might incorrectly come  out as go'i or nago'i which only
answer whether you are going to say it.

>> Likewise ".ei" can express a perceived obligation without necessarily
>> commanding it - and stating the obligation is not necessarily the same
>> as suggesting it.
>
>I know it is not the same, they are different instances of the imperative
>mood. That mood is not only used for commands, so "imperative" may not
>be the best name for it.

I think then that we are getting confused by the terminology.  I thought
you were talking about grammatical "mood" which is what "imperative mood"
usually refers to.  The exact expression of imperative mood  is different
in different languages, and may apply to somewhat different semantic
situations.  But you usage appears to be applying "imperative mood" to the
semantic situations covered by English (and perhaps Spanish?) imperative
constructions.

>In all cases, though, I think "ko" is a
>> indication of imperative mood that overrides any implicatures of the
>> attitudinals.
>
>The problem was not with {ko}, but what to use for the imperative
>case of {mi'o}. I said {e'o mi'o}, {e'u mi'o} etc can do the job,
>so that no new cmavo is needed for it.

Already thought of that one.  "doimi'o ko" should work.
What LOjban does not have is a third person imperative  (Russian has
this explicitly and it is grammatically different than 2nd person imperatives
- indeed kind of attitudinal-like.  English on the other hand expresses a
3rd person imperative as a 2nd person "Let him do it".)  I've never been
sure that this is not a hole - to an English speaker of course, a 3rd person
imperative IS a kind of 2nd person imperative with the verb "let or allow".
But Russian's 3rd person imperative is quite distinct from those verbs.

I've often wondered if there is some subtlety to third person imperatives
that is distinct from a normal 2nd person "let", so that we can see if the
subtlety can be expressed in Lojban.

lojbab