Subject: Re: [lojban] "za'o" & "still"

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 15:19:06 +0300

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