Subject: Re: [lojban] Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:13:13 -0400

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