From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Thu Jul 06 07:18:43 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 10055 invoked from network); 6 Jul 2000 14:18:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 6 Jul 2000 14:18:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO argo.bas.bg) (195.96.224.7) by mta1 with SMTP; 6 Jul 2000 14:18:35 -0000 Received: from banmatpc.math.bas.bg (root@banmatpc.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.2]) by argo.bas.bg (8.11.0.Beta1/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-6) with ESMTP id e66EIOS01256 for ; Thu, 6 Jul 2000 17:18:30 +0300 Received: from iad.math.bas.bg (iad.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.88]) by banmatpc.math.bas.bg (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id RAA09757 for ; Thu, 6 Jul 2000 17:18:24 +0300 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Message-ID: <39647939.4DF06CDE@math.bas.bg> Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 15:19:06 +0300 X-Mozilla-Draft-Info: internal/draft; vcard=0; receipt=0; uuencode=0; html=0; linewidth=0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] "za'o" & "still" References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski And Rosta wrote: > I agree with most of what Jorge has said, including that "still" > shd not be an attitudinal, but I strongly agree with Ivan that > "za'o" not = "still". I'm actually making a stronger statement, namely that no term of the `still/already' family can be covered by any ZAhO. ZAhO are semantic cmavo; they say where you are relative to the event contour, and that's it. Whereas in `still' et al. the pragmatic content takes precedence. The presuppositions, that is. Cf. the famous examples: (a) _Are you beating your wife?_ (b) _Are you still beating your wife?_ (a), which is not a loaded question, can always be answered by `yes' or `no'. (b) may also be answerable in that way (and if it is, (a) would also be answered in the same way), but it also may not, because it has presuppositions which, if not met, rule out both `yes' and `no'. In fact (b) can be paraphrased as: `(Presupposing that you used to beat your wife and that you may not be beating her now,) are you beating your wife?'. And how do presuppositions work in Lojban? Not through ZAhO, surely. But LE might work: a statement with {lenu broda} in it presupposes that something the speaker describes as a broda event exists, and if it does not, the statement is pragmatically ill-formed, not false. > The question then is, how to express "still" in Lojban. > It seems obvious that the only way is to use a lujvo: > "[still] fa le nu broda". Where `[still]' is {ranji} or perhaps {stali}. As I said, some languages actively use `continue V-ing' for `be still V-ing', and if it weren't for the fact that English is more comfortable using an adverb, such a solution might provoke less hesitation. --Ivan