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



...That might not be necessary, in that one could use {lo du'u go'i} and then give that an assignment...hmm. Oh well, I'll wait for other ideas.

.u'uru'e

mu'o mi'e latros.

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
Can you explain the use of {ku} to do something other than terminating LE? I haven't seen this before, outside of this case with PU, which I had thought was somehow anomalous (which was one of the reasons I came up with this idea).

Some example sentences:
ca ja'u mi klama lo zarci
"I am going to a store at this moment"
is the obvious example, which can apparently be done equivalently with {nau}:
nau ku mi klama lo zarci

The other example that {nau} can't do is using {ja'u} as an argument, which I can't immediately think of a good example for, but:
lo broda ku brode ja'u
would be grammatical. This is more exact as a usage than {lo cabna be dei}, in that it doesn't point to one or more things simultaneous with the utterance, but rather to the time that the utterance is made itself.

It might be more useful, now that I think about it, to have a conversion from tenses to time sumti, so that one could point at the present moment via a conversion from {nau}, as well as assign other times via conversion of the other things in PU. I haven't thought very hard about the grammar here (I don't even know if there's a selma'o for this) but (using {ja'u} since it is actually fairly hard to find a free CV'V):
.i ja'u pu zo'e [ku?] goi ko'a mi klama lo zarci .i ba ko'a mi klama lo zdani
"At an earlier time (ko'a) I went to a store). After that, I {tense relative to the present not specified} go to a house."

I am fairly sure this doesn't work, because there is now this sumti in the sentence that isn't an argument of the selbri and I'm not using fi'o, and at least one other problem, but something like this could probably work.

{zo'e} could then in theory be replaced there by something filling the {ja'u} role I originally thought of.

Thanks for the responses; learning some of the misconceptions I based this on were misconceptions was helpful.



mu'o mi'e latros.
2010/10/3 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>

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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