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



On Sun, 3 Oct 2010, Ian Johnson wrote:

I suppose this may help. How do I say something equivalent to this, preferably
with the same kind of extensibility, or can I not do so?:
I went to my house.

.i mi kalma le zdani be mi

Define the time at which I did this to be A. Before A, I left the store.

.i pu .a bu goi lo jai ca go'i mi cliva le zarci

Define the time at which I did this to be B. Before A but after
B I went to my friend's house.

.i pu .a bu ba by. goi lo jai ca go'i mi klama le zdani be le pendo be mi

A little long and awkward, but shorter and simpler than the English.

Thus unambigously establishing the sequence:
I left the store. Then I went to my friend's house. Then I went to my house.
without actually needing to come up with the events in the sequence in the order
that they occurred. Granted, the idiomatic way to say this in English in this
order would be:
I went to my house. Before I went to my house, I left the store. Before I went
to my house but after I left the store, I went to my friend's house. 
but we have {goi} to avoid this kind of thing already.

mu'o mi'e latros.

2010/10/3 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
      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).

This is where CLL explains it: http://jbotcan.org/docs/cll/c9/s9.html

(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.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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--
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

O what a heaven is love! O what a hell!

--Thomas Dekker

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