From phma@oltronics.net Wed Aug 02 20:15:20 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 1106 invoked from network); 3 Aug 2000 03:15:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 3 Aug 2000 03:15:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.oltronics.net) (204.213.85.8) by mta1 with SMTP; 3 Aug 2000 03:15:19 -0000 Received: from neofelis (root@localhost) by mail.oltronics.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id XAA23939 for ; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:15:15 -0400 X-BlackMail: 207.15.133.7, neofelis, , 207.15.133.7 X-Authenticated-Timestamp: 23:15:15(EDT) on August 02, 2000 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:13:13 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.29.2] Content-Type: text/plain References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <00080223151003.00881@neofelis> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Pierre Abbat On Wed, 02 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote: >On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Pierre Abbat wrote: > >> What's not clear to me is this: How do you say "that water bottle over there" >> when the bottle is empty now, and whenever it has water in it, it's here? > >You say "le vu djacu botpi", where the implicit potentiality is "can and has" >rather than "actually is". Only if the supposed water bottle neither >has nor ever could contain anything will I deny that it's a "botpi", >and even then, the non-veridicality of "le" saves you. Okay. But if I said "le vu botpi be djacu", would that mean that at some time the bottle was or will be over there with water in it? phma