From jcowan@reutershealth.com Mon Jun 26 10:22:03 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30273 invoked from network); 26 Jun 2000 17:22:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 26 Jun 2000 17:22:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 26 Jun 2000 17:22:00 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@skunk.reutershealth.com [204.243.9.153]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA14649; Mon, 26 Jun 2000 13:21:58 -0400 (EDT) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com Message-ID: <39579118.4B1C727B@reutershealth.com> Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 13:21:28 -0400 Organization: Reuters Health Information X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: pycyn@aol.com, "lojban@onelist.com" Subject: Re: [lojban] As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers] References: <7c.74fccee.2688befe@aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan pycyn@aol.com wrote: > So, after all the rhetoric against JCB for taking all predications without > specific markers as merely potential, He wanted to equate absence of markers with potential. We treat potential/actual as one more set of optional markers, which can be defaulted appropriately just like all the other markers. > Well, at least this allows me to call a bottle a bottle even if it never does > in fact have anything in it, because it is the sort of thing that in many > worlds better run than this one would have something in it. Just so. > What I can > presumably not say of my empty bottle is {ta ca botpi}. Actually what is forbidden is "ta caca'oca'a botpi" = that thing is now, ongoingly, in actual fact bottling something-unspecified. > This seems a little > odd, since when I say {ta botpi} I am probably NOT thinking of them worlds > over there and then but of the bottle I have in my hand here and now, that is > the untensed form is contextually focused to the present. This is very predicate specific. When you say that something is a beverage, you do not necessarily/typically mean that it is being drunk at this very moment; you are quite happy with a potential interpretion. IOW, the dispositional predicates like "soluble in water", "beverage", "heir" are not treated as a special semantic class in Lojban. Unexpressed tenses, like unexpressed arguments, are truly context-sensitive: they are Humptydumptyisms that mean whatever we need them to mean at the moment of utterance. -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)