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Re: [lojban] A pro-sumti for PU?



On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Latro <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
> My first post on the big jboste .ui
>
> Frequently this equivalence is used:
> caku mi broda == mi ca broda
> and similar such things with PU.

They are basically equivalent, yes, at least in such simple cases. You
have to be careful when you move it over negations, quantifiers, etc.

> But {ku} isn't terminating anything
> in LE, so this doesn't really make sense.

KU has two distinct uses in the grammar:

  term -> (tag | FA) [KU] | NA KU

and:

  sumti -> (LA | LE | quantifier) selbri [KU]

this may be seen as overloading, but that's how it's always beeen.
(Notice that the KU after NA is not elidable.)

So KU does not just terminate LE. It can also terminate LA or
quantifier plus selbri (which is similar to terminating LE, since the
result is a sumti, or it can make a term out of a tag or NA (or FA,
which is weird but grammatical).

> At the same time we want to
> be able to quickly say "now" or "later" without being constrained to
> putting the tense before the selbri. The simplest way would be to
> simply use {zo'e}, which is actually what I thought was going on with
> {caku} and the lot.

If you mean "ca zo'e", yes, it's semantically pretty much equivalent
to "ca ku", but syntactically that is not what's going on. "ca zo'e"
does not have any omitted terminator.

> But this isn't especially precise; we should be
> able to point at "the present moment" more easily and precisely, and
> also be able to talk about it in terms of more than just tenses.

The tense for "here-and-now" is "nau".

Talking about the present is different form situating some event in
the present. For talking about the present you would have to use "lo
cabna", or maybe "lo cabna be dei" for more precision. That's
something you can use to fill an argument slot, and so you can say
something about it.

> So why not give it a pro-sumti? The first CV'V I could find was {ja'u}
> (I was very surprised to find some of the CV'V that already exist;
> {ga'o} is a prominent example); why not use that?
>
> The short version of this:
> Proposal: {ja'u}: pro-sumti; the present moment relative to the
> speaker.

Example sentence?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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