Re: [lojban] srana zo za'o

Ah, the superfective (a studpid thing, but mine own), going on with the activities of a process after the perfection of a process: keeping on running after having run the mile, keeping on sleeping after the alarm (which should mark the end of your "sleep until the alarm rings"), living past your three score years and ten (or your heirs' need the money). And so on. The only two problems with the definition as you read it are 1) the end is natural only in context: running a mile is the end of running a mile, running after that is keeping on running -- which wouldn't be superfective if you were running two miles or a marathon, and 2) what you keep on doing is not exactly what you were doing: before the end of the mile, you were running the mile, after that you are just running, not running the mile (unless you a now running another mile, in which case someone might say you are keeping on running miles). So it is past some salient point (though just "now" won't do) defined by what you were doing before you began keeping one. The salient point is an explicit or implicit limit on the first process, after which the activity continues (note that the process/activity distinction is not very sharp here). He turned seventy but he keeps on running marathons -- he has done it for a while before seventy but seventy is surely an age to give that stuff up, still ... . In all the cases given, it seems the relevant point is more implicit than might be ideal, however, the {za'o} tells you to look for them and understand more of the story because of that.

From: v4hn <me@v4hn.de>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 6:55 PM
Subject: [lojban] srana zo za'o

Hey everyone,

because most of my recent contributions to the list
where about UDs and le/lo, I want to talk about
different things for a change. Though this is rather
a detail, I stumbled across it multiple times:

What's up with {za'o}?
It is defined as "continuing too long after natural end of ...".
Maybe I just misunderstand that definition, however,
many things {ba'e} don't have a natural end and people seem
to use it more as "continuing past some salient point in time"
(probably often "now") or simply "continuing".

Some examples I found:

In {le cmalu noltru}:
.i lo cuntu cu srana lo du'u mi za'o jmive gi'ikau mrobi'o

In {lo selfri be la .alis. bei bu'u la selmacygu'e}:
.i ku'i ry [to le ractu toi] ca na za'o se viska

In {la snime blabi}
.i se ri'a bo ny [to le noltruni'u toi] na za'o surla kakne ca ga lo donri gi lo nicte

How can I go on living past the natural end of me living? I suppose it's
"continue to live" in the little prince (and the original supports me here {.ui})

The other two examples translate as "does not continue" for me and I consider this
something rather different from "does not continue past the natural end".

The CLL on the other hand gives this one example for {za'o}:

{le ctuca pu za'o ciksi le cmaci seldanfu le tadgri}
The teacher kept on explaining the mathematics problem to the class too long.

The "too long" probably refers to the idea that the "natural ending point"
is already exceeded. I don't see this kind of translation in the cases I cited.

It seems to me the restriction "after natural end" is superfluous in the definition
of {za'o} and ignored in practice.

Also, how {ba'e} would one utter "She continues sleeping" without {za'o}?
{.i ko'a to'e de'a sipna}? Without the "natural end" I would just say
{.i ko'a za'o sipna}, which would mean {.i ko'a sipna za'o lo cabnu},
as described in the byfy section on {za'o}. But even then, I don't see
any reason to call "now" a "natural end" of her sleeping.

Any opinions?

v4hn