Subject: Re: [lojban] space tenses

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 22:04:43 EDT

In a message dated 8/12/2002 7:23:31 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Not at all! I can say {ko'a za'o zvati le purdi} to mean just the
> same thing. I am not transferring the superfevtive to {le nu carvi}.
> Nick's {pu'o} rule would have it mean that he's in the garden as
> it keeps starting to rain.

Well, clearly not just the same thing, but a more general thing of which this 
is a particular case. This is getting down to fine points here -- how far 
beyond the natural stopping point does the activity have to extend before we 
can say {za'o}, I would say that starting to rain is the natural stopping 
point and thus would figure that actually raining would be a good {za'o}. 
The axis needs to be the focus of the {za'o} period, not its beginning or end 
(necessarily) and certainly not outside it altogether, which I take the 
natural end to be (he hasn't gone beyond the natural end at the natural end).

<<
I think you cannot force the tagged sumti to be the axis/origin
in all cases. For example, in the case of the ZEhAs and VEhAs, the
sumti is the measure of the temporal or spatial extension over
which the event takes place. In the case of TAhEs and ROIs it is
the interval in which the repetitions happen. For example
{pare'u le cabdei} means "the first time today", so there may
have been other times in other days. {ciroi le purlamjeftu}
is "three times last week", {ru'i le nu jamna} is "continuously
during the war", {za'e lo mentu be li mu} is "for five minutes",
and so on. In all cases the tag could be taken to the main
selbri and the sense kept the same, only not as precise.
The sumti as axis/origin really only works for PUs and FAhAs,
which give the position of the main even relative to that
origin.

Well, part of the problem is that, if we are going to keep calling them 
tenses, we do have only vectors and axes to work with. So, if the form is a 
tense, then what it has is an remote axis, as a focus for an area or volume 
or whatever. Of course, if they are something else, then a whole other set 
of rules might apply and so, for example, ZAhO might have totally different 
rules and arguments from PU and the respectable parts of FAhA would have no 
effect. I would like to keep a rule throughout, but I may not be able to -- 
and the cases you cite are about (more or less) lengths rather than 
directions, so that may take a different set of rules as well (though ZI and 
VI seem to behave like PU). But, in fact, the examples you give do not seem 
to violate the rule described -- the axis need not be a point (I guess focus 
might be a better world altogether) and vectors can be 0s. If the cases you 
cite really are particularlizations of tense position cases (or the latter 
fuzzifications of these cases), then it almost has to be an axis involved or 
the event is floating free from any tie to the real world (or the fairy one, 
for that matter). 
I take it that {za'e lo mentu be li mu} is your cobbled together way of 
dealing with that problem (but shouldn't it be {xa'e} to at least pretend to 
be legal Lojban).