[lojban] Tenses(was subjunctives?)

[Pycyn@aol.com]

From: Pycyn@aol.com

Thanks to Xorxes, I have been driven to dig the Book out of variouis piles in 
transit from school office to home office.  And then to reread (after 5 years 
or so) chapter 10 on tenses and the like.  
1.  I find that the tense markers are, for all practical purposes,  only 
vector markers, since they revert to the established axis immediately.  The 
image of journey is thus less fitting than that of a glance, for we do not 
really move away, but only take a very temporary view of another time.  Even 
the axes necessarily created in compound tense (you can't have a vector on a 
vector, after all) are ephemeral, a slight adjustment for a better view, say. 
 
2.  The real axes are the "stuck" tenses, flagged by ki (not ca -- a small 
apparent inefficiency for which I have forgotten the reason now), to which 
subsequent vectors attach in place of the spoken now.  (Oh yes, ki because it 
can unambiguously deaxis/unstick a tense, whereas ca would not.)  So the 
whole system is there but slightly different from the way I remembered it.
3.  In natural langauges, the fourth axis is the remembered anticipated 
point: English "would" on those rare occasions when it has not slipped, as 
these forms tend to do, into the subjunctive use.  It is makred as an axis in 
English only by the possibility of "would have," an even more clearly 
subjunctive form in most cases.  I forget exactly what happens in Spanish but 
recall it as somewhat similar.
4.  The meanings of the aspects is not very clear sometimes (and not just in 
Lojban).  For example, 13.10 in the chapter has le ba'o zarci for "the former 
store" -- perfective of being a store, but being a store is a state and so 
its perfective aspect -- in at least one sense -- does not imply that the 
state no longer obtains (see Aristotle on all this), but here the aspects are 
strictly contour, so perfective does mean the evenmt (state in this case) is 
over.  On the other hand, inchoative, perfective's mirror image in some way, 
does not mean that the event will actually begin (though it does mean that it 
has not yet begun).  I think the intentional aspects fell by the wayside 
somewhere here, though bits and pieces of them emerge in various places 
(achievative, superfective).

Around -200 someone remarked that even the crows in Alexandria were arguing 
about which conditional was correct.  there were only about four candidates 
then; now there are probably 30.  But the decision for logicians is always 
the same (even in India, though more grudgingly): material implication (tftt) 
is the basic one and all the other are worked off of it or in a separate 
corner (formal implication, strict implication, relevant implication, 
counterfactual conditions in a dozen or so versions, weak implication, 
implicature, presupposition, ...).  Lojban follows that rule and then leaves 
us with the usual task of getting the other things right, either by 
modalizing  anai or by going into some other patha altogether to explain 
exactly what we mean.  The virtue of picking (almost) the weakest possible 
candidate is that it really does force us to think what we really want to say 
and not slough by with a mechanical translation, which will almost always be 
wrong.
pc

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