On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 12:53 PM, 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).
(Something weird happened to the html at the end of that page. I don't
know if anyone is maintaining it.)
"ca ku" and "ba ku" are probably the two most commonly used.
I have used "va'o nai ku" for "otherwise", i.e. something like "not
under (contextual conditions)".
"pu zu vu ku" has also been used as the start of fairy tales, as in
"once upon the time" or "long ago and far away".
There are probably other common uses of "tag KU" that I'm forgetting now.
> 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
Right.
> 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.
You can also use "lo tcika be dei" or "lo detri be dei" for a
different type of precision.
> 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.
We have FIhO to convert a selbri into a tag. Since every tag (tenses
are one case of tags) can be thought of as "FIhO broda" for some
appropriate broda, all you need to do is figure out which broda
corresponds to the tag you want to convert, and then use "lo broda" as
the sumti.
> 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."
You could say:
pu ku ca zo'e goi ko'a mi klama lo zarci .i ba ko'a mi klama lo zdani
Personally, I think Lojban already has way more cmavo than it should,
so I'm generally not in favor of adding new cmavo just because one can
think of possible uses for them.
I think it might not have been a bad idea for "nau" to be in selma'o
KOhA rather than being a tag, but I don't think adding things to KOhA
now is such a good idea, when I would like to remove about half the
things that are there already.