Re: [lojban] Revising mu'ei and CAhA once again. Possible worlds.

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:35 AM, Gleki Arxokuna
<gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> anyway, what is in your opinion the difference between {pu'i} and {ca'a}?

In my opinion "pu'i" should be (re)defined as "actually but not
necessarily". My reasoning is as follows:

"ka'e" and "ca'a" have basic meanings, while "pu'i" and "nu'o"
correspond to certain conjunctions of them plus negation. "ka'e" can
produce 4 different meanings when combined with negation:

ka'e
na ka'e
ka'e na
na ka'e na

"ca'a" can produce 2 different meanings:

ca'a (= na ca'a na)
ca'a na (= na ca'a)

By combining the 4 ka'e-meanings with the 2 ca'a-meanings we could in
principle achieve 8 new meanings, however 2 of them are contradictory,
and 4 of them logically reduce to a non-combined form, due to ca'a
entailing ka'e:

ka'e je ca'a (reduces to ca'a)
na ka'e je ca'a (contradictory)
ka'e na je ca'a
na ka'e na je ca'a (reduces to "na ka'e na")
ka'e je na ca'a
na ka'e je na ca'a (reduces to "na ka'e")
ka'e na je na ca'a (reduces to "na ca'a")
na ka'e na je na ca'a (contradictory)

That leaves two interesting meanings without a simple form, that we
can assign to "pu'i" and "nu'o":

ka'e na je ca'a = pu'i
ka'e je na ca'a = nu'o

The official English glosses for "pu'i" and "nu'o" are somewhat
misleading because they seem to mix them up with tense and/or aspect,
but modality should be kept separate from tense and aspect, so I think
these glosses are better:

pu'i: "actually, but not necessarily" or "actually, but possibly not"
nu'o: "actually not but possibly" or "actually not, but not necessarily not"

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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