Subject: memories

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 14:26:17 +0000

Let's consider these three English sentences:

E1) John remembered that he had watered the plants.
E2) John remembered watering the plants.
E3) John remembered to water the plants.

The first one goes into Lojban most directly:

L1) la djan pu morji le du'u dy pu jaursabji lei spati

{morji} means "x1 remembers fact x2 about x3" so it cannot
be used to translate E2 or E3 directly, we need to paraphrase.
(For some reason, Lojban tends to go for the least basic
meaning in these cases, this reminds me of {facki}. You can't
translate "I remember you" as {mi do morji}.)

We can only morji fe facts, we can't morji fe events, but
we can morji fi events, so we could translate E2 as:

L2) la djan pu morji fi le nu dy pu jaursabji lei spati
John remembered (something) about his watering of the plants.

Now what about "remember to"? It seems to me that to remember
to do something is to remember that one has to do it and also to
do it. I could say "I remembered I had to water the plants, but
there was no water, so I couldn't do it", but this one sounds
at least to me a bit strained: "I remembered to water the plants,
but there was no water so I couldn't do it". Perhaps "had to"
is a bit strong also, it could just be "was going to": "I
remembered to" = "I remembered that I was going to and I did".

If we forget about the fullfillment, we can use {pu'o} to
translate E3:

L3) la djan pu morji le du'u dy pupu'o jaursabji lei spati
John remembered that he had been going to water the plants.

But in that case, did he water them? Not necessarily for L3,
but almost certainly for E3, so not a good tranlation.

It seems that "remember to" is not only about memory but
also about fullfillment of an obligation or an intention.
Or can we take the fullfillment part as a Gricean implication,
if he remembered he was going to do it, then he must have
done it?

The same of course applies to "forget that" vs "forget to".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com