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Re: [lojban] Time-(non)local sumti (was: Mixing tenses, on the beginners list)


On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 9:32 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
Think of 'mi' as in the same class as 'lo' phrases, "the salient ...".  Otherwise you will  get into all manner of paradoxes (as old as philosophy, for the most part) of no practical value. 
Even claiming that doing so makes sense is a rather fundamental philosophical claim, namely that things like people can even be understood as being time-local in the first place.

I think that claim is not too philosophical, it's just a simple observation that people can be understood that way, otherwise we wouldn't be able to understand contrasts like "the new me" vs "the old me".
 
Still, this begs the question of what it means to be, say, {lo ca me mi ku}. If {mi} can be time-nonlocal in some contexts and time-local in others, then is {lo ca me mi ku} local or nonlocal? If this depends on context, how does one indicate that it is one or the other? 

I would say that if you are using "lo [ca] me mi ku" instead of plain "mi" then chances are you must be thinking of a plural "mi", be it spatially or temporally. Otherwise why wouldn't you use plain "mi" instead? If you use "ca", then the suggestion is that the plurality occurs temporally (otherwise you would use something like "lo vi me mi", "lo vu me mi" to restrict it. This of course is not a full specification. As usual, the price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity. You could say "lo ca jenai pu me mi" to select the present me that excludes the past one, You could use "lo ze'e me mi" to indicate the one that has always been and always will be me and so on. I don't expect these kind of expressions to become common though because it doesn't seem to make much difference whether we think of objects as (time non-local) wholes or as strings of (time local) stages. For a distinction to be strongly marked in language it has to make a relevant difference. 

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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