Subject: Re: [lojban] space tenses

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 16:59:53 EDT

In a message dated 8/13/2002 12:15:31 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> If "mi pu'o klama" = "mi pu'o zo'e klama" means "it is the runup 
> to my going", "I am about to go", then it's hard to see what "zo'e"
> can sensically mean. You and pc seem to be saying that 
> "mi pu'o ko'a klama" = "mi ca ko'a pu'o klama", but I don't see
> how that follows; it seems like an interpretation convention adopted
> so as to make your general tag equation work.
>>

Well, {zo'e} might work, meaning "now," but Lojban has no regular word for 
"now" so it can't replace {zo'e} ({ca} means "at the identified or implict 
temporal focus (axis)") 
I would say that the tag equation works because the reading of tense and 
sumti tcita do follow the same pattern -- with only the implicit axis being 
elided (because it can't be made explicit, if for no other reason -- like 
that it is assumed active if nothing else is offered). So the equation is not 
exact, but would be if there was a "now" to use.

<<
My own naive interpretation is that aspectuals are 1-place predicates
when selbri tcita and 2-place predicates when sumti tcita.
:
:
I feel that all the controversies over the tense system
stem from handling tense by tags rather than by selbri.

The problem with making aspectuals or tenses predicates is that we still need 
to hook things up to times and it is not clear how to do that (of course, it 
also gets the wrong thing in the dominant position, but that can be dealt 
with eventually). If we have a word for "now " (which would get around at 
least some of the problems with predicates) we are in a very different tense 
system from the one Lojban has. You may think it is a better system (I 
don't), but it is not this sytem. If you try to graft the predicate notion 
of tenses and aspects on to the Lojban system, you get an infinite regress 
and never get things happening at a time.

xorxes

<<
>You and pc seem to be saying that
>"mi pu'o ko'a klama" = "mi ca ko'a pu'o klama", but I don't see
>how that follows; 

Yes, I tend to agree. An implicit {ca} seems like the least
tampering with the meaning.
What would adding another (0) direction do (in this system), when the {pu'o} 
already anchors to the implicit focus (axis).

<<
>My own naive interpretation is that aspectuals are 1-place predicates
>when selbri tcita and 2-place predicates when sumti tcita.

I agree they have to be at least 2-place to make sense as sumti
tcita, yes. (Otherwise we get into weird cases like trying to
figure out how the event tagged by {fau} relates to the rest
of the arguments.)

I don't get this at all -- what two things need to be hooked up? The central 
event and the focus? That is done nicely by PU or ZAhO or ... And when the 
predicate is in place, it then becomes the main predicate -- rhetorically 
misleading -- and raises the question when IT applies. At best this adds an 
unecessary step, at worst it leaves an eternally unanswerable question.
{fau} isn't a tense nor an aspect nor interval, etc., so I am not clear how 
it fits in here, unless the idea is that ALL tags should be replaced by 
predicates, a move that is possible with many BAI, though wordy as Hell (and 
rhetorically misleading again, in many cases -- and God forbid we should need 
two of them). {fau} appears to be just another of the many "if"s in Lojban, 
in this case a contingency on and it relates to the main clause in the usual 
"iffy" way -- when the {fau} clause is satisfied, the main clause becomes 
operative as whatever kind of sentence it is: description, command, ... .

<<
I agree with you anyway. The second place of aspectuals I get
by adding a ca-place. So for example {co'a} as sumti tcita
corresponds to {cfari ca zo'e}.
Well, more or less, if you take "corresponds" broadly enough. It would not 
be {zo'e} there, though, but the sumti just tagged. And there is the 
rhetorical problem again. And we have not gotten rid of tense sumti tcita 
yet. And the present system does it all just fine as it stands.