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



On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 6:56 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
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. 
This amounts to saying it can be local or nonlocal, but doesn't specify how to *explicitly* state the distinction. The ability to make such specifications (if the language supports them at all) is pretty much my third axiom for Lojban design :)

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

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