Re: Subjunctive?

["Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>]

la pycyn cusku di'e

>The virtues of puba and bapu are just that they don't tell us how the event 
>is related to now, which is sometimes useful, when we don't know exactly: 
>"He will have arrived by morning" (and for all I know is arrived already), 
>etc.

I would say:

     ko'a baba'o tolcliva ca le cerni
     He will have arrived in the morning.

That says nothing of whether he has already arrived.
I don't think bapu would work at all here, because
of the connection with "ca le cerni". "ca le cerni"
would either have to be the start of the imaginary
journey, which would mean that the arrival could be
later than that, which we don't want. Or "ca le cerni"
would have to coincide with the end of the imaginary
journey, which puts the arrival exactly at the morning,
which again is not the meaning we want.

>Most of the other compounds mirror the needs of a language
>which has obligatory tense, so needs compounds to move about in a 
>narrative,
>as Lojban does not -- or not nearly so often.

I don't know... Compounds with "ca" are just redundant.
"capu" means exactly the same as "puca" and as just "pu".
That leaves only "pupu" and "baba". I don't think
there's anything like "baba" in English. The only one
that could be like something in English is "pupu",
but in narratives, which is mostly where this could
come up, the convention is that the tense takes as
reference the time of the previous sentence instead
of the speaker's time, so a double pu is not needed
even there.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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